


dreams are sweet (until they're not) flowers bloom (until they rot)

by somniatoressinespe



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: F/F, Hadestown AU, also id say this is a soulmate au, bc I said so, thats it, thats the plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-04
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:14:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27882093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somniatoressinespe/pseuds/somniatoressinespe
Summary: That’s when Dani’s eyes wander to a girl clad in jean and soot.Her fingers falter, as the whole world comes to a still. And a first breath is taken.And it tastes like fog and words unsung as they cling to her throat.or "dani sings her way into jamie's heart"
Relationships: Dani Clayton/Jamie
Comments: 20
Kudos: 91





	1. Road to Hell

**Author's Note:**

> lets be honest this was just all an elaborate excuse for me to write about greek myths

_There’s an old song, an old tale from way back when._

_Each time the voice singing it changes, each time the song itself becomes slightly different. A detail added, a detail missed. No one knew exactly how it started, and yet everyone knew how it ended._

_The song belonged to a woman and her wife. It was a song about death and descents into hell. It was above all else, a song about love._

_And we're going to sing it again._

_The au pair- that really wasn’t an au pair this time around, but who still had a fondness for children deep in her heart- saw the gardener one day._

_The gardener wasn’t a gardener either this time, but she still had a love for green, alive things. And the au pair that wasn’t an au pair loved her at first sight._

_(Some things, nothing could ever change.)_

**

Dani’s last breath will taste of murky lake water and a name not yet learnt.

(But a name, oh, so loved.)

(But that comes later on when the story is already half spent.)

Dani first breath comes instead at twenty-four, and it feels like coming alive again all at once.

Dani is twenty-four and singing a song for the few people waiting near the bus station, her eyes not focusing on the grey smog, or their pained grimaces, or the empty case in front of her. 

She tries, even more, to not focus on her empty stomach.

Dani is twenty-four and her eyes wander through the sky, through the faraway promise of trees in the horizon, through the pavement tracking each small vine pushing through the cement, before settling on the street in front of the station.

She thinks maybe this is not where she’s supposed to be, but there’s nowhere else to belong.

She watches the people walking fast, weaving through each other without even looking up from the sidewalk. 

It reminds her of home, though it’s not necessarily a good thing. She tries not to think about it and switches her attention to the other side of the square.

And that’s when Dani’s eyes wander to a girl clad in jean and soot. 

Her fingers falter, as the whole world comes to a still. And a first breath is taken. 

And it tastes like fog and words unsung as they cling to her throat.

Dani is twenty-four when she settles her eyes on Jamie for the first time- _this_ time, _another_ time. Though she doesn’t know her name is Jamie yet, though she doesn’t know who Jamie will become to her, though it feels like she does know all these things already.

She watches the girl shrug her shoulders together as she walks, braving against the not quite winter, not quite spring wind in a too-big jacket. Her dark curls dance with the wind and Dani has never been more mesmerized in her life.

Dani has never met someone that quite literally managed to steal her breath away.

Later, she will think maybe it was less empty poetry and more a death sentence. But that’s later and this is now.

And the now is: Dani knows from the tale she had heard her father spin too often, the tale of how he and her mother had met, that she had just found who will become her greatest muse, her greatest love. 

And the now is: Dani remembers this feeling like she has felt it before- many and many times before. 

And the now is: Dani can feel, deep in her soul, the loss of it too, like it already had happened- like it always will be.

She’s too caught up in the revelation to pay attention to the figure stopping by her side. 

“You could talk to her?”

Her right-hand shoots down, so hastily she almost breaks a string. Her pick slip from her fingers, falling too close to a grate for comfort- she didn't have the money to spare for picks, not anymore.

(And just like that the spell is broken.)

(And just like that, Dani forgets. The only thing left behind the intense impression she _must_ speak to the girl.)

“Jesus Christ, Owen,” she hisses, letting her guitar fall to rest behind her as she bent down to pick up her pick, “Warn a girl next time.”

Owen just grins under his moustache. 

Dani rolls her eyes. The nerve of him, you would think him twenty years younger than he was.

He’s holding two cups in his hands, and the smell of good coffee- that he _only_ ever brews for her, the saint- cuts through the fog left in her mind by the sight of the girl. But before Dani can reach for the cup she assumes is hers, Owen lifts them both up and out of her reach.

“Well, will you?”

“Yes,” Dani blurts out, before remembering herself. She watches from the corner of her eye Owen’s moustache bunch up into a grin. “I mean no!” she tries to backtrack. 

But it’s already way too late, he had found something to bite down on. And he would not let go- and Dani might have not known him long, but she knew that.

“Go on then, will you?” he nudges her in the general direction of the girl, “I’ve been trying to get Hannah alone for a night.”

She shoves him back, ignoring his alarmed yell for ‘hot coffee in my hands, Clayton’. “Oh well, excuse me for intruding on your lovely dinner plans.”

“You’re excused. But you know you’re always welcome, Dani. I just think you could use some new friends too. Maybe some more than friends too.”

And there goes another nudge. She had taught children more mature than this man, she swears.

“I meant no! I meant…” she trails off, and she turns to watch the girl again, without meaning to. 

She doesn’t know what she means, she just has the weirdest instinct that the girl she’s watching cross the square is nothing short of significant.

(It feels like she’s moving through the motions. Like she would walk away from everything in her life just for the chance to talk to the girl clad in jean and soot. Like she’d give up _anything_ to talk to her.)

(It feels like she’s a girl at the beginning of a song, though she has no way of knowing that.)

Dani’s feet move almost on their own.

“Dani?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t come on too strong,” he warns, the wink diminishing the stern effect by the thousands.

Dani refrains from rolling her eyes at that. 

When had she _ever_?

Her life had been one careful step after the other. A boring, endless sequence of not stepping on the cracks. 

And she had wanted it that way. She had wanted to want it. She had thought it selfless. And then she had thought it would go away, but it didn’t. And then she had thought it selfish.

It was a boring life. It was a boring story. 

An ordinary one, too. 

Dani had found herself too much for the restrains of ordinary the day she had tried on her wedding dress, when a stranger touch and a stranger compliment had elicited in her more than five years with him.

And then… and then that’s how she had found herself in a tiny rural town in the middle of nowhere familiar, and that’s how she had found Owen, and that’s how she had started singing again.

And that’s, she found herself thinking, was how she had met Jamie- though she still doesn’t know her name. 

Yet.

**

_The au pair that wasn’t an au pair didn’t know how she had crossed the busy street without winding up brutally disfigured, especially since she had been still so unused to looking left, instead of right. And yet, she had managed it._

_Fate was afoot, after all._

_The au pair that wasn’t an au pair had paid little mind to her friend’s warning, and now she found herself paying even less attention to anything that wasn’t the girl in front of her. The girl she had an uncanny sensation she had met already._

_A girl she was going to meet again._

**

“Hi there,” is what she means to say. 

She practices it in her head as she crosses the street. 

_Hi there._

(Short. Cute.)

_Hi there._

(Maybe a bit lame, a bit overused- but maybe just lame and overused enough, Dani thinks, that it ended up being endearing.) 

She says it again in her head- _hi there-_ as she crosses the street. _Hi there,_ a line from a script if she could fancy herself James Dean. She half jogs the last of the distance before the girl could turn the corner of the street and be lost in the mass of blacks and greys entering the subway.

Though the moment she reaches her, she’s stuck with the most peculiar sense of déjà vu, a voice whispering her a new line, and what ends up coming out of her mouth is- “Come home with me.”

The girl stops in her tracks, hand busy fiddling with a cigarette and a lighter. She doesn’t look up though, doesn’t acknowledge Dani in the least, as she lights her cigarette, bracing the flame from the whipping wind around them. 

“Hi. Hi there,” Dani finally manages to stumble through the original line she had directed for herself.

The girl finally looks up at her.

(She thinks that if someone was to take a picture right then, right there, it would look a lot like two lovers meeting again.)

( _Journeys end in lovers meeting_ , a voice sings in the back of her mind.)

“What did you say?”

It doesn’t surprise her, the tilt of the girl’s accent. She’s been here long enough it doesn’t faze her anymore- though she doesn’t quite sound like the others she’s met, like she too was a passenger in a foreign route. 

And she doesn’t see the surprise in the girl clad in jean and soot when Dani herself had spoken. She’s lived here for far too little to not scream foreign to the locals at first glance. 

Still stings a bit, though.

“Hi?” she says, more or less asks, gulping down the ‘there’ before it can escape her lips.

“And who are you?”

_The girl that’s going to marry you_ , the same someone whispers in Dani’s ear. She refrains from saying the words out loud, just barely.

She doesn’t think the girl is listening much when she answers with her name, but she commits hers to memory. 

Jamie.

Jamie, a girl that could inspire a melody.

(She refrains from saying that out loud, too.)

And she hadn't planned much after her ' _hi there'_ and even that hadn't gone too well, and now she's standing silent in front of Jamie's slowly lifting eyebrow.

“That’s not a good habit, you know?” Dani blurts out, because, apparently, she’s forgotten how to have coherent conversations with pretty girls, and more so a pretty girl who looks pretty pissed.

Oh gods, she’s _so_ butchering it.

“What’s it to you?”

She winches. “Nothing?”

“So, any reason you stopped me?”

“I saw you. Here,” - _and what’s about this girl that gets her so tongue-tied_? - “And I thought well. I wanted to introduce myself.”

This time, she does get a reaction past indifference and aloofness. “Why?”

“I thought we could be… fr- friends,” she stumbles over the word under her stare, before cringing at it. 

Friends, _really_? What was she, five and pigtailed asking the boy with round glasses if he wanted to play with her? She tries not to groan out loud.

Then again, she doesn’t think it could be a good idea to tell Jamie she’s, well… not fallen in love at _first sight_ for her- that’s overly ridiculous. But it had felt like something very, very close to that.

(A spark rekindling an old fire.)

(A song she knew but with a new melody overlapping with the old.)

“Friends,” Jamie repeats and shakes her awake from her reverie? Was that the word? Or maybe it was a delusion. Her eyebrow ticked off in a way that can only be a mix of unimpressed and uninterested.

She could take the former, but the latter… the latter felt unbearable, like a dive in icy waters.

“Friends,” she confirms and then swallows. 

She’s trying to see if she can master spontaneous combustion in the time it takes her to say it. It doesn’t work. She’s instead left to face the silence and Jamie, both very unyielding.

“You’re… a bit bold, aren’t you?”

Yup, Dani had done butchered it.

She’s been here long enough she knows that there are two meaning to the word. And she’s afraid that the one Jamie means is not much of a good thing. She also knows she’s never been too good at giving up.

She only knows she doesn’t want to give up on this yet. “Oh, you’d say so?”

Jamie laughs then- and gods, Dani doesn’t want to be _that_ lesbian, but it’s… a remarkable laugh. A golden chain tightens around Dani’s heart.

“Yeah, I’d say so,” Jamie pauses and takes a long drag of the cigarette- Dani watches her and she understands the mechanics of combustion a little better, a little more intimately- before adding, “Though maybe a little bit too pretty.”

And Dani can’t help it, the way she burns as Jamie smirks. 

“But you knew that already, didn’t you?”

She swallows and looks away. The clouds seem all of the sudden very interesting.

(Though that's a lie because she has a feeling nothing could be more interesting than the woman she's standing in front of at the moment.)

“Would you want to grab a drink?” Dani asks the sky, and when the silence lingers for a touch too long, she clarifies, nervously, “With me, I mean. A drink. With me.”

“So we can be friends?” 

And Dani doesn’t know if she imagines the sneer with which Jamie says the word friend. But well, fuck it. Fuck pretences. 

She braces herself, before taking her hand. She manages three seconds and a brush of a thumb before she lets go.

Jamie, if anything, looks more shell shocked than Dani feels.

“Who the hell knew?”

“Not friends,” she pushes the words out, “If you’d want. You… come home with me?”

“Shite, Elvis. You flirt,” Jamie laughs- not the same one as before, though, it’s breathier, more nervous- and the laughter curls around the words. 

Another golden chain wrapped, another turn of the key locked. Dani should feel heavier, but she doesn’t. 

“Elvis?”

“I assume you know how to play that one,” Jamie says, shaking her thumb in the direction of Dani's beat-up guitar.

“Maybe.”

“You any good?”

“Yes.”

“Then Elvis.”

“Are you sure you didn’t just forget my name?”

“Who knows,” Jamie says, crushing the cigarette against the heel of her black boots- Dani’s very aware of how her heart could crumble against it, too. And she walks away without giving her an answer.

Dani hopes it isn’t the last she sees of her.

(And the three voices in the back of her mind sing of destinies and fated meetings.)

Over time, Dani moves from the square to all the little recesses around the town. 

She starts in Owen’s restaurant, on Sunday nights- when the people come for the food they don’t want to bother cook in their own homes. And then people come to see _her_. 

(Owen likes to call her golden goose after that, Hannah groans and Dani laughs.)

(It’s good, she thinks, to have friends- genuine, _good_ friends- again.)

Then she moves to the pub on Saturday nights, when the owner, a small burly bald man seeks her out after Owen had brought down the shutters. 

The pub brings laughter- which she loves- and drinks from men- which she could do without. But she sees Jamie, on those rare Friday nights she comes down for a drink, and that’s worth any hassle she gets from the boys of the town.

She wonders if Jamie had thought of her. If she had wondered about her half as much as Dani did her.

And she wonders- she hopes- for two Saturday nights before Jamie gives her an answer. 

(New beginnings are meant for spring, after all, and the wine is so easily poured when her aunt is around.)

She’s taking a break between songs, smiling as she took the pint from the kind bartender who may have interested her had she not met Jamie first- Jamie who doesn’t leave her mind, Jamie who had brushed past her, Jamie who was now sliding in the seat next to hers.

“Why are you always singing stories?” Jamie says, eyes trained over her as she sips her beer, and it feels like each word had been a battle to get out.

Dani barely suppresses a smile as she watches Jamie trying- and failing miserably- to be nonchalant in her question. 

That’s fine, though, Dani thinks, she’s never been too good of an actor either and she doesn’t think she had come as aloof either. She doesn’t think aloof is a thing she could be, with Jamie.

She still tries.

“Hello to you too.”

Jamie rolls her eyes, before amending. “Good evening, Elvis. Why do you only sing stories?”

“What else is there to sing about?” she asks in answer, tilting her head as she considers her words. 

Her upbringing, her musical education, had been far from run of the mill it seemed. Because for her, stories were songs, and songs were stories. She had never bothered with a distinction before. She doesn’t think she would like to, now that it’s been bought to her attention.

“I don’t know,” Jamie shrugs, toys with the condensation on her glass, “The others always seem to sing about love.”

“Those are stories, too,” she can’t help but point out. Jamie isn’t very impressed if the eye roll is anything to go by on.

“No one sings quite like you do.”

And it’s then that Jamie finally looks her in the eyes, and just like the first time their gazes had met, Dani’s breath catches in her lungs. Jamie’s eyes glow a golden ichor under the harsh neon light and Dani burns from the inside out. 

“Who’s the flirt now?” Dani says, before setting down her glass, the beer sloshing with the too fast movement, and taking her guitar back. 

It’s a gamble, to turn away now, but Dani feels like Tyche may be on her side this time.

She doesn’t take another break until the end of the night. Though she tries not to, her eyes wander always to the corner of the counter where she has left Jamie, only to find her looking back. And maybe Dani sings better than she ever has when Jamie’s eyes are trained on her.

There are so many songs crowding her head, they taste like honey and molasses, they feel bright and oversaturated. They remind her of childhood days spent in the sun. She doesn’t know what they mean yet, but she thinks she gets closer and closer each time their eyes meet.

When the crowd dwells more by the door than by the counter, Dani stops her singing and returns to her corner. 

Jamie’s still there, waiting. And Dani has never won a waiting game in her twenty-four years of life, but she knows she will this time.

Jamie, to her credit, only cracks after the second pint shared. “So?”

“So?”

(Dani has no intention of making this easy.)

“Why stories?”

(Jamie rolls her eyes and hides her smile into her beer as if she knows.)

“Stories,” Dani says, after another glass has been offered, “As long as you sing them, stories never end. And even when you stop singing them, they remain. Even after the wine is gone. And they help more than the wine ever could.”

Jamie scoffing at her words isn’t what Dani had expected, but this is the first time she has her undivided attention, so she’ll take it. 

“So what? You’re a philanthropist?”

“I just want to help,” Dani shrugs and feels silly as she says it, but it’s the truth and she seems to only ever want to tell Jamie that.

“A bleeding heart, then,” Jamie amends, her words dripping with sarcasm, but Dani, strangely, doesn’t feel mocked. Just a bit sad. For Jamie. 

“You say it like it’s a bad thing.”

Jamie shrugs. “It’s not a fair exchange, is all.”

“What isn’t?”

“How you pour, and you pour, and the lake is never filled.”

Dani looks into her glass. She doesn’t know when they had switched to wine exactly, but it’s red and heavy on her tongue. It makes everything feel more serious.

“Maybe, it’s not about filling the lake at all. Maybe, it’s about how someone has to do the pouring for it to ever be a lake in the first place.”

“But why does it have to be you?”

“It doesn’t have to. Be. Just me, I mean. I think, I… I don’t know,” Dani laughs at the weight of their conversation, “I’m just an aoidos, Jamie.”

“No, you’re not,” Jamie says it like it’s a death sentence, but doesn’t elaborate and Dani lets her let it go.

It’s a dance, she realizes, half conversation, half sparring. She has to pick the right moments to lead and the right moments to follow. “What about you? Do you ever fill your lake?”

“I find exhausting just the thought of it. People just aren’t worth it.”

“Well, that’s disillusioned,” and Dani is baiting her, she knows she is, and so does Jamie if the way she playfully squints is anything to go by, but. 

But Jamie is so, so _interesting_. She wants to pick her apart, to find her melody. She can’t help herself. And Jamie rises to the challenge so beautifully, she can’t find it in herself to feel guilty at all.

“You’d have to buy me a drink for me to start talking.”

“Didn’t I already do that?”

Jamie shakes her head, huffing out a laugh. “Another then.”

She pours Jamie the last glass the bottle will ever give. Finds the act ironic enough to smile. Jamie doesn’t smile back, suddenly sombre.

“You’ll laugh.”

Dani is a bit offended Jamie would think that of her. Then again, they don’t know each other yet, no matter how Dani feels, deep in her bones, that they do. “I won’t.”

“Alright, here’s the thing. Most people aren’t worth it. Most people are just coal dust setting in your lungs and eating you inside out. People are exhaustive. Even the best ones.”

“What’s worth it then?”

“Plants.”

And okay, Dani is a big enough person to admit she didn’t see that one coming. “Plants?”

“Plants give back everything you pour, and more,” Jamie’s eyes light up, and Dani finds herself leaning closer, mesmerized, “You pour water and effort and love and… and they _bloom_. Plants are worth it. But then—”

It takes a few sips before Jamie continues. Dani waits. She has already figured out how to wait for Jamie.

“But then there are some people that come around and they feel like seeing the sky after having been underground for so long you forget that the world isn’t just the black soot under your fingernails. But then I met _you_. And you… god, you just might end me.”

Dani could swear that in that instant twenty songs make themselves known in her mind. She can hear the melody of each one, and the stories she will tell. Dani could swear that Jamie gifts her what no one else could ever give. 

(Honesty free of poetry.)

(Life, simply put.)

“Come home with me?” Dany asks- begs- because there’s nothing else to say, because she has never felt like this, not once; because, since the night began, she swears they’ve been the only people left in the world.

“Are you always like this?”

“No. Not at all. Not even a little.”

Jamie shakes her head. “I think you go a bit too fast for me, Elvis.”

“I can slow down.”

“Okay then,” Jamie agrees.

“Okay?”

“Lead the way, if you fancy the walk.”

Jamie doesn’t wait for Dani to finish her drink to stand up. She just does, putting her jacket on before holding Dani’s open for her. Dani scrambles to follow, and the fur has never felt warmer around her, as Jamie wraps it around her.

“So,” and Jamie’s so close to her ear- so close to her everything- as she whispers, Dani almost doesn’t focus on the words at all, “Daughter of the muse, where to?”

That epithet is enough to bring her back to her senses- the fact Jamie is out of her personal space might also be of help to her awareness. “How did you know?”

“It’s a small town.”

Dani sighs- she really should have known- and then laughs. “Guess cat is out of the bag.”

Jamie doesn’t say anything else, and Dani leaves it at that.

They walk quietly, and it’s enough to make Dani’s whole body shake. She doesn’t do well in quiets; she doesn’t like it when her thoughts are louder than her surroundings.

“A king too,” Dani says, breaking the silence, her nervous babbling habits coming through full force, “They always forget to mention my father. Not that I blame them. A king seems hardly special when you compare it to a muse.”

“Shall I call you princess, then?”

“You need a new nickname to use? Planning on hanging around some more, then?”

Jamie’s laugh comes as a bubble popped, there one second bursting in glittering pieces, gone the next.

“You are _such_ a flirt,” Jamie smirks, before adding, “Princess.”

Dani never cared much for her royal title, a moniker without reason in a world like theirs. She could fancy herself a princess though if she were to be kept by a dragon like Jamie. 

“When it suits me.”

The silence comes back. 

It’s a small town, and she could fancy it’s quiet enough she could hear Jamie’s heartbeat thumping in unison with hers. This time, though, Jamie speaks before Dani could ramble herself some more into her grave.

“You know, I don’t usually follow pretty girls back to their places.”

She doesn’t know if it’s the wine, sticking her lips together, making her words taste like glue. 

Yes, the wine, she thinks as she watches Jamie, backlit by the lonely streetlamp that marks the steps to where Dani had rented a room for the past month. Certainly, the wine. 

Wine was of the sticky sort.

“I’d wondered,” is what she settles down on.

And when she bends down to kiss her, she swears the world stops to a still.

She thinks there must be gestures. Gestures she had already learnt somewhere else, gestures she had already learnt with someone else, but at this moment there’s only Jamie. 

She thinks she’s never been kissed at all if this is what a kiss felt like.

It’s like starting anew, and it’s like coming home, too. So achingly familiar and yet so foreign. 

It’s like Jamie had already kissed her before, but it was a memory from centuries ago- an over-saturated photograph aged stained with curled corners hidden preciously in a pocket over her heart. It’s like they had kissed hundreds of times across hundreds of years and had forgotten each time until the next had come.

Jamie brings Dani’s arm around her waist, leading her hand gently until it rests against her hips, before gripping Dani’s elbow tightly. Every little touch burns into Dani’s flesh through the layers of cloth, a permanent indent left behind in her soul.

She curls her fingers around Jamie’s waist, fingertips digging into coat pockets and wishing for bare skin.

Jamie makes a sweet little noise in the back of her throat and Dani wants nothing more than to elicit the same response again and again and again. She grips her hips a bit too roughly, bringing them together abruptly.

(It’s so _desperate_.)

(Later, when her lips aren’t so preoccupied with kissing Jamie’s back, she will wonder why all their kisses felt always so desperate.)

Jamie gasps and it makes Dani so lightheaded she comes back to her senses. She flinches away and regrets it as soon as the act is done. “I…”

“Did I?” Jamie had stopped holding her the moment Dani had retracted, and that felt as unforgivable as the flinch, but her hands were trembling, “Was it too much? Or—”

“No! No. That’s not it at all. It’s not you, it’s me.”

Jamie, if anything, only looks more defeated. “Yes, of course. I shouldn’t have—” 

“No. Not of course,” she takes Jamie’s hands- they’re smaller than hers, slightly so, and Dani spares a second to think how well they fit together with hers- and now there was a different reason behind Dani’s shivers. 

And yet she holds them still.

“Not at all,” she repeats, “I’m sorry. It seems… it seems I don’t know how to hold myself together when I’m not falling apart.”

She frowns when she realizes how that explains everything and at the same time nothing at all.

“What?”

Jamie looks at her like she doesn’t believe her, one eyebrow ticked higher than the other.

“I’m sorry. I… I’ve never done this before. Not with someone. Like you.”

_Not with someone that matters so much to me_ , she wants to say, but they’ve known each other less than a month and actually talked for much less than that. And yet. And yet, it doesn’t feel like a lie or an excuse. It feels like the truth.

“Dani,” Jamie calls her name and her whole soul bids her to answer- but the moment is gone, and Dani might never forgive her body for it.

“I just don’t—”

“It’s okay. Slow, remember? There will be other nights.”

_But I want you now,_ Dani wants to scream, but her hands start trembling all over again. “Promise?”

Jamie leans down, pecking her lips oh so softly that Dani is sure part of her dies and parts from her lips. “It’s a promise.”

_No, not a promise,_ the voice in the back of her head corrects, _it’s_ _fate_.

And Dani knew that. She has known since the first time she ever saw Jamie, so she tries to be brave. “Come on up?”

“I don’t know, Elvis.”

“Please?” and she knows her voice had faltered in a whine, but she hardly cares, “I don’t want you to leave.”

“Well, when you put it like that,” Jamie says, but her eyes are so kind Dani drowns in them, “I’ll take your couch for the night then.”

“No! I mean… I can take it, it’s fine.”

“Elvis,” Jamie drawls- and Dani burns pink- before she smiles becomes full of mischief, “Were you trying to get me in your bed with you?”

She smiles back, sheepish. “You want some sweats?”

And she thinks the memory of Jamie’s laughter at this moment, star dotted, will never fade.

(She’s wrong, of course, but she doesn’t know it yet.)

(Journeys _end_ , after all.)

**

_The au pair that wasn’t an au pair remembered with stark clarity the first time she ever saw the gardener that wasn’t a gardener asleep._

_She could barely catch a glimpse of the sunlight bouncing off the gardener’s left cheek, drowned by the abatjour still lit by her right, but that glimpse had been everything._

_She remembered thinking that the wallpaper had been blue, the last time around. She remembered frowning at the thought of a 'last time', confused. Then, the gardener had stirred slightly._

_And the au pair that wasn’t an au pair couldn’t find in her any reason to keep frowning._

**

The next morning, it takes a minute to place why there’s a warm body pressed against hers, why her arm is curled around a soft waist, why her heart feels so at peace with the world. She hears the soft platter of the rain on the window and has half the mind to huff- typical, when did it stop raining in this town? – but she doesn’t.

There’s nothing she could complain about, right now, at this moment.

She has a song on the tip of her tongue, about Sunday mornings and rain falling. 

She doesn’t realize she’s been humming it until Jamie stirs and turns sleepily in her arms.

And maybe Dani’s breath gets all caught up in her chest at the sight. Maybe she stops her humming not in surprise, but in reverence. She had learnt so much of worship, and yet she doesn’t know what to do with her hands when Jamie looks at her.

Her eyes are so dark at night, and then amber in the light of morning. And her dark curls coil around Dani’s fingers when she brushes them away from her face.

It feels too intimate, too much and much too soon. And Dani is just like a kid in a candy shop- she can’t help herself.

“Never quite ever been awaken by this species of songbird.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

And she’s so close, oh so close. Songs and words don’t seem to matter when she’s this close. 

But it’s too soon.

“I’m so glad…” _I met you_ , Dani wants to say- but it’s so confusing, the pace at which Jamie is growing in her heart, she doesn’t… “You stayed.”

“Of course.”

And Dani thinks- she hopes, oh how she hopes- she may not be the only one being born again each time their eyes meet.

A new song, then. A soft, longing one she heard her mother echo when her father sang. It was so rare to heart her mother echo back. A poor bargain, she thinks, to inspire so much and only be able to echo it back. 

(Sing to me, muse, yes, but never her own words.)

And again, she finds herself humming, enjoying the way the song vibrates in her chest. She won’t let the words fly just yet, though. Too much, and much too fast.

She wishes time would stop and she wishes time would go by. She’s a contradiction under Jamie’s gaze.

“One could get used to this kind of wake-up calls,” Jamie teases, sleep still lacing her voice, but some sort of fire seems to lay underneath the words. 

And Dani wants to _burn_.

She traces slowly the curve of Jamie’s cheekbone. “Maybe you could.”

Whatever Jamie was about to say back, was lost as she took a quick intake of breath- and that’s… interesting. She lets her finger brush slowly over her lips then, feels the gasp on her fingertips, and she finds herself mesmerized by her own effect on Jamie.

The desperation leaks from her heart then, into her bones, into her flesh, pours out of her eyes and every crevice of her body until all it is left in it is a sort of aching, a sort of longing she knows could only be quenched by Jamie’s lips on hers.

So she cups her other hand over Jamie’s cheek gently- as gently as touch could be made. Every touch, every graze felt profane and holy all at once. A pilgrim at a shrine. A confession behind a screen. A cigarette behind a church.

Jamie leans into her hands, lifting herself up on her forearms and her arm presses against Dani’s front.

“Kiss me?” she whispers, more plea than a question.

And Jamie- sweet, sweet Jamie- blushes before asking- “You sure, Elvis?”

Dani nods, up and down and up and down again. Then she says it out loud- “Yes. Please.”

“Thank fuck,” Jamie whispers, before crashing into her like a tempest.

It feels at once, too little, too much, and perfect.

She burns so bright she fears she may never stop, but all stars have known the universe- but all the stars die in the silence. 

That would be a good song lyric, Dani thinks, before Jamie brushes her nose against hers and kisses her again, deeper, and sends any other coherent thought flying away in the ether.

(And Dani hopes.)

**

_It had taken time for the singer to fully unveil the coal miner, this time._

_There seemed to be no moonflowers to show, this time around, no moonlit nights laid down for them. Only coal dust persistent under scrubbed fingernails._

_Until one day the gardener told her._

_Told her about her family, and of three children fathered by two kids. Told her about the shame, and the abuse, and the burdens put on a child. Told her about foster care, and then jail. Told her about coal, and the sins of fathers that always end up burdening their children._

_And after everything is told, after the gardener finally lays bare in front of the singer, the singer had held her._

_(The coal miner held everything up and the singer held her. The singer found herself thinking there were worse trades to be made than this.)_

**

There are other mornings, there are other nights, just like Jamie had said.

Other mornings and other nights when nothing else matters but Jamie’s body curled into hers. And life isn’t always perfect but this, Dani thinks, is as close as she can get to it.

And she's never been good in quiets, but Jamie settles her in a way she never thought was possible.

She is drawing slow, lazy shapes on Jamie’s bicep when Jamie breaks the silence.

“Do you ever think about running away?”

“Well, I guess you could say I already did,” but that’s not what Jamie had asked, that’s not what Jamie had wanted to say, so Dani asks, “Do you?”

“Who wouldn’t want to get away from this shithole?”

“I find parts of it charming, actually.”

“Flirt,” Jamie accuses her, and Dani lets her pretend that’s all it is. 

Dani may not be the best of liars, but she’s good at pretending. Even if her heart strains against her ribcage each time she watches Jamie walk into the room. For Jamie, she would pretend.

“Would you run?” she asks again, this time hoping for the real answer.

Jamie sighs, and she sounds older than she was. “I tried, once.”

“And?”

“You know what they say about idle hands.”

“Not really.”

Jamie laughs, not the usual laugh she lets out when they’re alone, but the biting one she always laughed when she was in the pub after her last shift of the day. 

“You do,” she accuses- and well, she's right, Dani knows- “It doesn’t matter much, anyway, it’s all in the past. And look at me now, I’m a shining beacon of reform.”

“Sure, let's call it that,” Dani plays along, smirking at her. She knows she did the right thing when Jamie pushes her away with a fake-wounded gasp.

“That _hurt_ , Elvis. Do your fans know you're so vicious?”

“Would you run again?” Dani asks because she has to. Because she thinks she knows what the answer is, but she still wants to hear it from Jamie’s lips.

Jamie stays quiet for long enough that her heart starts pounding, though not for the usual reason it does when she’s under Jamie’s stare.

“That depends,” she says in the end.

“On what?”

“On if you’d run away with me.”

Dani can’t help how she smiles at that, but still- “Charming.”

Jamie doesn’t rise to the challenge, just laces their hands together.

Entwined, Dani thinks, that’s the right word. 

She doesn’t think she could begin to unravel their bodies, or their souls, at this point. She wouldn’t know where Jamie began and where she herself ended. Sharing this love that felt all the more unreal with each day that passed.

(Even if they hadn’t called it that, yet.)

( _Not_ that Dani is waiting for it to be called love. She isn’t. Really.)

“Oh,” Jamie shoots up, her hand digging into Dani’s stomach all of the sudden. Jamie whispers a sorry before she curled back into her body. “Sorry.”

“What? What were you thinking about?”

Jamie sighs, before letting her head fall on Dani’s shoulder gently. “Need to buy milk for the tea. I’m out.”

Dani purses her lips and bites her cheek. “Really?”

“You’re the one who asked. What?” Jamie looks up at her, face pressed flush against Dani’s shoulder, “Were you expecting something romantic, sweetheart?”

Dani can hardly help the way the corners of her lips tug up at that. She tries to hide it into a pout, but a laugh is threatening to burst out of her lungs. She bites her bottom lip to try and stop it. 

“No.”

Jamie’s lips play at a smile too.

“Liar,” she says, but she lifts herself up just enough to leave a soft, barely-there kiss against Dani’s lips, so she’s counting the conversation as a win.

Dani can’t help the way her lips spread into a smile, can’t help the way she chases after Jamie’s lips as soon as she breaks away, can’t help the way she melts into her as she kisses her again and again.

They collide and Dani thinks of stars and planets and gravity, thinks of fate and destiny and dreams long forgotten and buried under years of growing old and growing up. She thinks well…

“I thought I dreamed you,” Dani says softly, barely a breath away, more to herself than to Jamie, “Before we met. I think I dreamed of someone just like you.”

“Now _that_ would be quite the nightmare.”

And Jamie jokes, and Jamie deflects, and Jamie hides disappointments with a smile, and Dani sees underneath it all, despite everything.

“No, it wouldn’t be,” she says, and it sounds like an argument- maybe it was- “It really wouldn’t be, Jamie.”

“Okay, baby,” and the pet name is new enough that her cheeks tint pink- and _that_ makes Jamie smirk until Dani slaps her arm- “What did dream me do?”

“I don’t remember,” Dani lies, even though she knows Jamie will catch her in it immediately.

_(I’m not a good liar_ , she had confessed very soon into their relationship.

_I know_ , _Elvis_ , Jamie had replied, _your voice pitches each time you try to_.

She thinks she’s never felt more _seen_ than in that moment.)

“Yes, you do.”

“Maybe.”

“It’s fine if you don’t want to tell me.”

“No, I do. See? I must have dreamt you. No other explanation possible.”

Jamie links their pinkies together, then brings Dani’s knuckles to her lips. Dani’s breath catches in her chest. 

It’s soft, and it’s tender, and Jamie always did this. 

Cared for her in a way no one else had ever done before, held her in ways she thought were only possible in love songs. And this is why Jamie would make the perfect gardener, Dani thinks, because she tends to with _care_.

And well, what is she supposed…

“What am I supposed to give you,” Dani whispers more to herself than to asks her.

Jamie answers her anyway. She always did.

“Just love me as much as I do you, Elvis. We can figure out the rest later.”

It takes her a second to realize what Jamie had said. It seems it takes her a second too, because the blush comes to her almost ten seconds after the words had. 

It doesn’t surprise Dani all that much. 

She had already known. 

Hell, she had known she was going to be in love with Jamie from the moment she saw her. She didn’t need to learn how to love her, she was born with the knowledge engraved in her bones, in her flesh. She didn’t need to learn how to touch her, how to kiss her, how to comfort her. 

She had already figured out the end before the beginning had even started, it was all about figuring out the middle part.

The middle part is Jamie is so much more than just a girl clad in jeans and soot.

The middle part is Dani is so much more than just a girl with the voice of a nightingale.

The middle part is holding each other. The middle part is Jamie reading a book while Dani strums her guitar and sings softly. The middle part is going to sleep together and trying to figure out how to wake up together when Jamie wakes with the sun high in the sky and Dani… doesn’t.

Simple as that.

But still, to have it spoken out loud… Dani feels shivers against her spine and she’s oh so desperate to hear it again and again and again.

She swallows, and the sound seems to reverberate in the silent room.

“I think I can do that.” 

“Yeah?”

Jamie’s eyes go crinkle happy. Dani loves it so much laughter wants to bubble from her too, silver and tingling straining against her throat. She lets it out, giggles as she manhandles Jamie until she’s basically sitting in Dani’s lap. 

“Positive,” she confirms, before kissing her.

Or trying to kiss her because, while they’re both smiling so wide, kissing is nothing short than pressing their smiles together again and again. Clinking teeth and happiness.

So, she stops trying and holds her instead. As close as she can. And, as Jamie buries her face into the spot where Dani’s neck met her shoulders, Dani can feel the smile pressed on her skin, and she fancies for a second that it will leave a permanent indent in her soul.

“I love you,” Jamie says, and Dani’s chest buzzes with delight.

“I love you, too,” and then, because it’s true, she continues, “I think this is the happiest I’ve ever been.”

And then, when Jamie lifts her face to kiss her and the soft light smooths over her cheeks… then, Dani has a revelation.

Love isn’t possession, it’s the furthest thing from that. Jamie had agreed with her what feels like another life ago- then again maybe it was a life back, she doesn’t know. What she does know is that love isn’t possession. 

Of course, it wasn’t. 

And Dani thinks that, maybe, too many people confused belonging to with belonging _with_ and that was where the crux of the problem laid.

Dani doesn’t belong to Jamie, that would be wrong. But it’s also wrong to assume she doesn’t simply belong _with_ Jamie. 

She belongs with Jamie as they lay lazily on their couch. She belongs with Jamie in a too crowded pub. She belongs with Jamie when they argue about their standards on cleanness.

And Dani doesn’t want to belong with anyone else.

**

She enjoys watching Jamie, at times.

Like in those rare mornings she manages to wake up before her, as the sun barely glints off her delicate features, as the boiler starts to hum. If she were a different kind of artist, she’d paint it. 

She’d paint the happiness that makes itself home in her chest when Jamie’s smiles, or laughs. When Jamie kisses her.

She enjoys watching Jamie in the mornings, but she loves watching her move on lazy afternoons as she puts the kettle on for tea. She loves watching her shuffle her way in the too big sweats she had stolen from Dani, and she loves the care she puts in the act. 

Maybe, she muses resting her head on her hand, she’s just in love with Jamie. 

She breaks into a grin at the thought.

Yeah, maybe that was it.

Today she has another reason to be staring, though.

So, she watches as Jamie struggles to get the tea from the cupboard. The tea Dani had stored just a shelf too high that morning after the shopping. On purpose. She hides her smile in her hands. 

It takes two hops on her tiptoes and one frustrated groan before Jamie turns to her.

“What did you do?”

“Me?” she points to herself, lifting her brows up excessively and widening her eyes, “Nothing.”

Jamie crosses her arms, rolling her eyes- but there’s a smile in the corner of her mouth, a twinkle in her eyes, and Dani knows her too well to be fooled. 

“Yeah, that’s the face of truth and integrity right there, love.”

Dani laughs despite herself. “I just don’t know what you mean.”

“Can you please—”

“I can’t touch it,” she interrupts before Jamie can finish her request, she shrugs as Jamie’s eyes narrow, “Direct orders. I might make it unholy.”

“Dani.”

And Dani just wants her to smile, so she drops her voice in the worst imitation of a cockney accent she can muster. 

“Desecrate it,” and then she drops the accent and slows her voice into a drawl that she knows made Jamie’s knees weak, “I think were your exact words, love.”

“Dani,” Jamie says again- or maybe whines, she should say.

(The drawl, she thinks, gets her every time.)

Dani doesn’t miss a beat. “Jamie.”

Before Jamie can actually throw something at Dani’s head, though, she stands up. Instead of reaching around her, she traps Jamie between the counter and her body. She reaches up and takes the tea bags, eyes never leaving Jamie’s.

It’s deliberate the way she brushes her arm up Jamie's and then down as she sets the box down before she grasps her bicep one finger at a time. 

(It’s deliberate too, she guesses, the way Jamie angles herself to mould their bodies against each other.)

(Sly foxes the both of them, Dani thinks and she smirks.)

“Hi there,” Jamie whispers, and not even a whisper seems to disrupt the spell Jamie’s put her under. 

_Witty banter,_ Dani reminds herself, _you’re in the middle of flirting with her. Keep your head in the game, Clayton._

“Are you stealing all my lines then?”

Jamie wrinkled her nose as one of Dani’s locks brushes against it. “They’re really bad lines.”

“Then why use them?”

“Anything to make you find new material, Elvis.”

“My muse,” Dani drawls- tongue dripping with sarcasm, though it hardly sounds like a joke. Jamie has never been nothing less, nothing short, of just that.

“Where’s my song then?” Jamie asks.

“What?” Dani makes her eyebrows shot up in disbelief, “You wanted one? Awfully romantic of you.”

“I’m just saying you sing an awful lot about love and not one is about my…” Jamie trails off, obviously trying and failing to come up with some absurd mocking of Dani’s usual songs.

“Your?”

“I don’t know, Elvis. My general person. I’m not the singer here.”

Dani laughs, but she doesn’t tell her how all her songs were hers, all along. And she doesn’t tell her of all the ones that flutter in her head every time she looks at her, every time they kiss. She just bends down to kiss her, hoping that it will be enough.

(She thinks happiness may come on swallows’ wings, but it doesn’t have to leave with them.)

**

_The au pair that wasn’t an au pair and the gardener that wasn’t a gardener live, after that._

_(As they did each time.)_

_Days turned to months, the months to more, and then years passed quietly. Time stretched and unfolded around them, and for a time, they’re happy. The singer still sang, the coal miner still went down deep into the earth- but every night she came back to her, and that made all the difference. It always would._

_And life was good._

_Life was always good until it wasn’t._

**

It hadn’t been a particularly noteworthy day up until that point, quite boring actually, in its ordinariness. And then everything changed. 

It had been a freak accident. 

(That’s always how it goes.)

A really bad, unexpected, freak accident. 

(A viper’s bite, usually.)

That’s something everyone wants her to know. That there were no people at fault. That sometimes mines collapsed. That sometimes, people were left trapped. Trapped in a place where no green things grow, where no human being should ever be.

That it had been a freak accident, and now Jamie was… missing.

Missing from the count of the dead, missing from the count of the living.

Dani thinks that they say it to make her feel better.

A freak accident.

A missing person.

She collapses to the ground at one point, she thinks, because that’s where she is, that’s where the wrong arms hold her as she cries.

And she thinks about how you never take much notice of the sky until it comes crashing down on you.

They ask her questions.

She doesn’t give them answers- she thinks Hannah does, though.

She will remember the questions much, much later, after she has finally managed to shake off Hannah and Owen. There were many. She focuses on one, more than anything else. Because when they had asked her what to think on what to write on the grave, she hadn’t known what to answer, or how.

It’s not something you think of when you marry the love of your life. 

She keeps on thinking about it now, though. And it feels mean just to think it, but Dani had always been so private in her mourning. Funerals are for the living, anyway, and mourning was too.

If only Dani could feel alive for long enough to think about graves and funerals.

What would she write? It seems so useless, as useless as burying an empty box, but she thinks about it because there’s little else to think about that isn’t Jamie’s broken body, left underground.

It wouldn’t be enough to write her name, and her birth date, and her death’s. It wouldn’t be Jamie.

Gone too soon, might be added. A sentence so tragic to anybody who might find themselves in front of the stone and care enough to do the math with the dates written on it. But so many are gone too soon.

(She had not thought Jamie would be one of those.)

(Or maybe, she should say she had hoped.)

No. Jamie would want more than a gone too soon. She had been more than a 'gone too soon'. And even thinking of her in past sentence left such an indent in her soul. She thinks some more about inscriptions instead.

She loved plants and green, alive things. Maybe.

She used to walk barefoot on hardwood floors but hated the cold of tiles.

She loved like a forest on fire- not like burning coal, but like crackling wood in a campfire.

They’re not good enough. Nothing is enough. Words are meant to be her thing, but she's lost all of them.

Her voice is broken, her arms empty, and nothing will ever be enough. Not again.

She doesn’t think she will ever sing again. She doesn’t think she will ever live again. And she can’t help but think, that this is not how it had happened the last time. 

(And the thought shakes her to the roots.)

(And Dani remembers.)

**

_The au pair remembered the story only once the gardener was lost to her._

_The gardener never remembered at all._

_The au pair often wondered who had it worse between the two of them. Not that it matters all that much, because, after all, this was a tragedy._

**

The thing is, Dani was and always will be the daughter of a muse and a king who became a river. 

The thing is, she knows and always will know that there are beings older than her and older than her mom and older than the lord of the underworld, himself.

The thing is, the people had whispered of the lady of the lake since Dani had arrived and will whisper of her after Dani's gone. And Dani knew that trades could be done if you had the right goods to bargain- and if you were ready to pay the right price.

(And Dani would trade it all if it meant Jamie would be safe.)

Not many mortals knew the truth about the doors that lead to the gates of hades. They thought there was only one mouth, one descent possible.

They never stopped to think that, just like death was all around them, hell was, too.

Her descent will be different this time. She had left her guitar home, lay it to rest in the sheath that never was its home. She hadn’t left anything else to find.

She knows by now that gods didn’t like it when people upset the order of the universe, but she figures that a life for a life, a fate for a fate, wouldn’t upset the balance. Not much. But just enough Jamie would be safe.

And that would be enough.

The lake’s as still as it always was when she arrives. A mirror of murky water and foggy vapour. Dani hated it from the very first glance.

“Are you sure about this?”

She doesn’t turn to face her. She doesn’t need to. She knows the voice as surely as she recognizes the flowers growing by her feet. “You’re not the goddess of crossroads, I don’t think that’s your line.”

“This world has such little use for spring, lately,” Rebecca sighs with all the melancholy gods always sighed with- and Dani remembers how she too was stuck in a cycle she couldn’t break- as she looks far off into the horizon, “It gets shorter and shorter.”

“You should talk to your husband about it.”

Rebecca ignores her dig with all the grace of the queen of the underground. 

“Why do you keep making this choice?”

Dani almost laughs out loud, at that. There’s little to laugh about, though, so she doesn’t. “Show me another choice to be made.”

“It’s not your usual one.”

“I’m changing the melody,” Dani says- the melody, it’s always the melody she never quite could catch. The words come before, and she recognizes the steps, the tempo, but the melody is always the last to arrive. Maybe because if it did, then she’d know how it’d been a tragedy from the beginning. “Maybe like this, she’ll live.”

“You know that’s not how it works.”

_As if that had ever mattered,_ she wants to yell, _as if I ever followed her down in hopes of bringing her back._

“I love her.”

“He loved me, too,” Rebecca counters and she feels like Rebecca will never quite understand. Not Dani, not Jamie, not the love imprinted in her bones for her. To love Jamie had never been a choice, to follow after her even less.

“He made me feel…” Rebecca trails off, her eyes going vacant for a minute, “Alive.”

She says alive, but Dani understands she means mortal, instead. 

(Oh, the privilege of their condition in the gods’ eyes.)

(And yet here was Dani, outliving her own capacity to love. Every existence was a double-edged sword.)

“Alive and good aren’t the same.”

Rebecca doesn’t say anything back, and Dani doesn’t need her to.

Love wasn’t possession, and Peter had never loved her at all. Not in any way that mattered. It’d be cruel to say out loud, it wasn’t like Rebecca had had any choice in the matter anyway.

“Could you…,” she asks instead, “Could you tell her something for me? Find her and tell her?”

“I’m not the god of messengers either.”

“I thought you were branching out,” she snarks, before remembering she’s technically asking for a favour, “I-Please.”

She has never seen her aunt’s eyes look so sad before. “Okay.”

She doesn’t think she could ever say all the things she wants to say. She had never thought of the last words she would say to Jamie. It feels naïve now, how she hadn't prepared them. 

She tries her best.

Dani faces the lake, and Rebecca puts a hand on her shoulder. “You don’t have to.”

“But I do.”

Rebecca leaves one last touch on her shoulder, before vanishing, the flowers wilting as soon as she did.

She wades in until the water licks her ankles with each wave.

She watches her own reflection looking back at her.

She never liked mirrors; her childhood bedroom devoid of them for the most part. Only one, actually, was hidden on the other side of her wardrobe’s door. And as she grew up, as the eyes around her started to linger more and more on her, she tried to stay as far away from mirrors as she could.

She had only ever liked her reflection when she saw it in Jamie’s eyes.

But that doesn’t matter anymore.

She opens up her mouth, and she sings. She sings the song her mother bided her never to sing but that she had still taught her. 

The one that made the wind stop to listen and the tree bend down their branches. The one that made humans leave their homes to walk into the fire. 

She sings, and then when she’s done, she slashes her palm, deep enough she finally feels something beyond the numbness she has felt since Jamie hadn’t come back to her. 

Blood, to feed the souls of those who wandered in death. Blood, to make them remember. Blood, to call them back to the living.

She waits as her whole body starts to shiver, be it the cold or the fear- the realization of what she was doing, maybe, or the dread of being too late.

But her mind’s calm. The sort of calm you only get once in your life. If only her body recognized it as such and stopped its trembling.

It doesn’t take long for the lady of the lake to emerge.

It’s terrifying if Dani were to be honest. _She’s_ terrifying, and strange, and foreign to a mortal as is their future, as is their fate, as is their death. Dani thinks she’s meant to be terrified.

But Dani is a lot braver than people give her credit for.

She spills the blood, and then she spills the honeyed water. She watches as it all disappears in the murky water down below. She waits to see if the ferryman will take her offer. 

She doesn’t know if she’s relieved or not when the lady in the lake takes her up to it.

It’s more than just a soul for a soul. She’s breaking the cycle. She’s giving up on any chance of loving her again. It’s a fair trade, she thinks, for _this_ Jamie. 

This Jamie that was so slow to fall, and so quick to love. This Jamie who had lost so much and gained so little for her troubles. This Jamie, that left a deep indent in her heart.

(As it would be a fair trade for any of her Jamies.)

(The names change, but the feeling remains.)

She just wishes she could have seen Jamie one last time. Just one last time. She watches the sun set as she drops the last two steps before the plunge. 

“Jaime,” she says one last time. 

It feels right to die with her name on her lips.

And the lake and the woods echo right back the name she’s already starting to forget.

**

_The water was cold. Much colder than the singer had anticipated._

_Then again, the singer reasoned to herself, she was dying._

_And still, she waded deeper into the murky waters. Knowing that with each step, she was leaving her beloved behind. Knowing that with each step, she was keeping her safe, keeping her alive- and that was worth a lot._

_It was worth the singer’s own memory._

_It was worth the singer’s own life._


	2. Wait For Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jamie meets Danielle Clayton when she’s on the verge of twenty-seven and it feels something akin to plummeting to her death from twenty feet off the ground. 
> 
> When she bothers to look up to meet her eyes, that is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> exactly a week later.... and they say procrastinators cant keep imaginary deadlines
> 
> edit: why did NO ONE tell me i formatted this wrong its BEEN A MONTH

**

_It’s an old song._

_It's an old tale from way back when._

_It's an old song._

_And we're gonna sing it again._

_(As if it might turn out this time.)_

**

Jamie meets Danielle Clayton when she’s on the verge of twenty-seven and it feels something akin to plummeting to her death from twenty feet off the ground. 

When she bothers to look up to meet her eyes, that is.

Then again, she wouldn’t know much about falling. So maybe it feels like those times she’s been in the mines for so long that every inch of her is covered in black soot, even her insides, and she knows she’s going to die in that blackness- because of it- with absolute certainty.

Yeah, that felt more accurate.

She spots her the very day she comes into town.

_Hard not to, when she’s so obviously not from around here_ , Jamie thinks as she sees her walking past with her nose stuck in a yellowed map, _so obviously not from this hopeless shithole_.

(She pretends, even with herself, that she doesn’t just spot her that first day because she’s so damned pretty.)

She can't help wrinkling her nose when she sees her.

Wrong shoes for their weather- ridiculous white sneakers, not the sturdy boots everyone else in town wore, the only option for when the mud gets stuck to every part of you. 

And her jean jacket- still so prim and clean, free of coal dust in a way that nothing that stays in this town stays for long. 

And her eyes… her eyes were the blue sky of the kind of movies that faded on a kiss, or the clear seas of Mediterranean shores. Not the eyes meant for a town of fog, rain, and misery.

_A foreign girl who had no reason to be here and no reason to stay_ , she thinks.

She bets with herself she’ll be gone by the end of summer and thinks that’s that. Done and dealt with. She decides not to spare another thought for the girl with the pretty blue eyes as she walks the rest of the way to the mines.

(She’s not gone by the end of summer, though.)

(And Jamie seems to not be able to get rid of the thought of her just as much as she can the sight of her.)

She hears about her next in the pub. 

She hears of her pretty blue eyes and her pretty blonde hair, that make all the boys want to talk about her when they go in for a pint. Her pretty voice, too. The voice of a nightingale, or so they keep saying. 

She hears, their voices tinted green in envy, of how she has begun hanging around the hole in the corner restaurant by the square- the only square in town, the _only_ restaurant in town, and Jamie wonders again who would move here by their choice- or, more accurately, around the owner Owen Sharma.

The latter fact is more or less being mourned by the whole male population of the town under thirty and Jamie hardly can contain the scoff when they tell her. 

Because of course.

Of course, the new girl was drooling all over Sharma, she could count on one hand the number of girls in the town who wasn’t- and she had bedded two of those. 

If only Sharma wasn’t so likeable and wasn’t tragically and obviously in love with Hannah Grose, Jamie could hate him better. And that’s the thing of small towns and people with nothing better to do, everyone knew everyone’s shite. Another reason not to move here, she reckons.

She drinks her pint and climbs back up to her flat. 

(She falls asleep to thoughts of golden hair and sky-blue eyes and flowers blooming in spring.)

She _tries_ not to listen, the next time she walks through the square, as she passes by the busses waiting at the terminal. She soon finds it’s impossible not to.

The first thing she thinks is that the guys at the pub were wrong. 

Not the voice of a nightingale. This voice, she thinks, it’s far from harmless bird calls. This voice, it could call sailors to their deaths. It could inspire poets and make others quit on the spot.

The voice of a muse- or maybe just the daughter of one, if rumours were to be trusted.

This voice, she reckons, and that face, well, maybe not a thousand ships, but a good hundred… yeah, she would launch them all.

She shakes the thought off and walks her way to the mine, rolling a fag as she went.

And Jamie used to fancy herself someone that wouldn’t follow a skirt around just because the woman in it was the stop and stare kind of gorgeous, but. But then, she _meets_ Dani when she’s on the verge of twenty-seven. 

And it feels something awful close to falling.

(Ridiculous, that’s what Jamie was.)

“And who are you?” Jamie asks because she won’t give her the satisfaction of falling to her feet adoringly, like all the boys in town did, or would do if Dani had ever interacted with anyone in town that wasn’t Sharma and Hannah.

( _There’s a power hidden in names, a reason not to be careless with one’s own_ , Dani will one day tell her, _and yet I gave it to you because knew it would be safe in your mouth_.)

“Dani. Dani Clayton,” the girl answers, and even though Jamie had already known the name sends a shiver down her spine.

“Dani.” 

The name is out of her lips before she can stop it. 

( _Mostly, it seemed like I had waited my whole life to hear you say my name_.)

The way the girl smiles after she says it, sends shivers down Jamie’s spine. “What’s your name?”

“Jamie.”

“Jamie,” the girl repeats, low and soft and reverent. 

Suddenly, Jamie’s name doesn’t feel hers anymore. But no, that wasn’t exactly right. It suddenly feels all the more her own. Dani said it and it felt like an uncut gem being cut. Something precious realizing itself.

Oh bollocks, she can’t be this lost over a girl she had barely exchanged three words with.

(She’s _definitely_ too pretty.)

**

_The singer always fell at first sight._

_And when the coal miner fell, she always fell in spite of herself._

**

Jamie shouldn’t be here.

She should _not_ be here.

It’s a Saturday night, and she was in the pub again, despite her best interests.

She really shouldn’t be here.

Because Dani’s voice already haunted her enough each waking day- each hour- without Jamie having to seek her out on Saturday nights when she knows she’s supposed to be singing. 

She wants to scoff at the thought, but that’s exactly what Jamie is doing. Seeking Dani out. For no good reason too, she might add.

She doesn’t _want_ her, she reminds herself. Dani was everything she shouldn’t want. Dani was hopeful eyes, and too pretty- beautiful, really, gorgeous, actually- and exactly the type of girl that would bring Jamie to her knees.

And yet here she was, pint in hand, on a Saturday night, listening to Dani charming the masses of rowdy drunks in the pub under her flat.

And then she isn’t anymore, because the music stops.

She feels more than sees Dani slide next to her. She hears the stool being pulled back, and the dull thud of a guitar case being set next to it. She also feels the many stares on her back- stares she had never wanted in the first place.

“Hi,” Dani says, breathlessly- some part of her wonders if it’s the singing, or if it’s the sight of Jamie, that leave her thus- and Jamie doesn’t bother looking at her when she replies with a grunt before she drowns it with her pint.

“I haven’t seen you in a while,” Dani tries again, and when Jamie turns her head, she finds her smiling wide and happy in a way that stopped heart right out of her chest. God, this was exactly the kind of thing she had wanted to avoid.

(The stupid heart-misses-a-beat thing, the idiotic forget-how-to-breathe thing.)

There’s some deep red sheen on her lips that makes it distracting to even glimpse her way, and Jamie is all the more aware of how dangerous she was to her sanity.

“Sometimes people need to be alone, Elvis.”

(The stupid falling-in-love thing.)

“Oh,” Jamie watches as Dani blanks, slightly, her grin disappearing, “Oh. I’m sorry. I… I didn’t mean to. To… I see, I’m…”

Jamie will never know what Dani is, because then she stands up all at once, stool scraping against the hardwood floor. It’s loud and halting, and Jamie feels all the more the stares digging her way into her back.

And Jamie finds that there’s an ache too between her ribs, dreadful and cold, as she watches Dan’s cheer deflate. And Jamie finds that it breaks her heart, to watch her walk away.

“Not now,” she rushes out before she can think better of it- voices screaming in her head to not let her go, voices screaming in her head to watch her walk away- “I… you aren’t bothering me, Elvis, alright?”

And when Dani’s smile comes back, Jamie finds that it makes her feel… alive.

Ain’t that the saddest thing you’ve ever heard?

She watches as Dani settles back in the stool next to her, smiling at the bartender who gave her a pint without her even having to ask. She wonders how it would feel like, to be handed anything without having to speak for it.

(Daughter of a muse, daughter of a _king_.)

And Jamie’s reminded once again how she really shouldn’t be here.

“So…” Jamie starts, before realizing she doesn’t actually know what to say, “Cheers.”

Dani smiles, carefree in a way that almost makes Jamie think she hadn’t noticed.

(And still so kind.)

“What was that last song about?” she blurts out, before staring at Dani turned her into any more of a fool.

And for as much as Dani tries to hide it in her pint, Jamie can see her pleased grin plain as air. “You were listening, then.”

“I don’t reckon anyone has ever managed to ignore you, princess.”

“You’ve certainly _tried_.”

She doesn’t catch Dani’s face when she says that, but she can feel the dull tone of disappointment that makes Jamie’s avoidance of her for the past week sting all the more.

“I…” she shrugs as she looks away, waving for another pint, “I’ve been busy.”

“Yeah. You said so,” and then because Dani seems to be the kind of person unable to hold a grudge- “It’s a bedtime story from my family.”

“Not a very happy tale to tell your children,” Jamie muses, before she frowns, realizing how rude it sounds. And then frowning at how she had never cared for niceties before- before almost a month ago, before last Saturday night, before well… before _Dani_.

“I’m afraid we were never a happy family, to begin with.”

Jamie certainly gets _that_. “Cheers then. To unhappy families.”

"To unhappy families," Dani clinks her glass to hers, her eyes never leaving Jamie’s. 

The conversation wanes then, but it’s a comfortable silence- or as much silence a pub ever is. Jamie looks into her beer and catches with the corner of her eyes Dani watching her. She swallows and she watches Dani’s eyes track the movement, her mouth thinning into a line before she pulled the bottom lip between her teeth.

Jamie turns her head the other way in a flash, all pretence of composure long gone. She swallows again, but when she turns Dani is just smiling at her, dimple poking over her cheek.

“You look at me sometimes,” she blurts out, because apparently, she now has no self-control, too. She’s never been as thoughtless as she was when Dani looked at her.

(She's never been as carefree either, it has to be said.)

“Do I?”

“Yes. You look at me like you…” she trails off, shaking her head, “It’s stupid.”

“There’s much to look at,” Dani says, her eyes dropping down to Jamie’s lips in a slow deliberate arc, her voice barely over a whisper as she continues, “You look at me too.”

Jamie hopes her face isn’t bleeding the anticipation she feels in her chest. “You know I do live right upstairs.”

“You do?”

Jamie has to laugh then, because, for all of her wide blue eyes and cute dimples, Dani’s apparently absolute shite at feigning innocence. 

“Yeah. Funny, thought I mentioned it last time. Got a nice little flat, right up the boring little pub.”

“Must have passed my mind,” Dani shrugs, and Jamie rolls her eyes.

“Sure, it did. I don’t usually lead all the pretty girl upstairs, though.”

“Not true, from what I heard.”

Jamie lifts her eyebrow up and Dani shrugs, her hair falling in golden waves as she did. “Small town. Rumours go both ways.”

“That they do,” Jamie agrees, because it’s too true how they do, for how much she didn’t want them to.

(She wonders what the towners say of her.)

(Orphan, shunned, unloved… there was so much she didn’t want Dani to uncover yet.)

“Lead the way, then, if you fancy the walk,” Dani says, voice dipping up and down in all the wrong places, the sounds so plainly off and wrong she wonders if Dani had done it on purpose. By the way she laughs at Jamie’s face she has a hunch that she did. She rolls her eyes.

“That was terrible, princess.”

Dani pokes her arm, and it burns through Jamie’s sweater. “You laughed, though.”

“Pity.”

She doesn’t want to focus on the way the light makes Dani’s eye sparkle with mischief. She doesn’t want to focus on the way her heart misses a beat, as Dani smiles. It’s too much. How can one heart bear it all?

“Oh, I’m sure.”

And for as much as Jamie’s fancying watching Dani’s weird and characteristic mix of nervous bravado, she also fancied the way Dani blushed underneath her the other night.

“You’re hot and I’m a fool, is that what you wanted to hear?”

She really fancies the way Dani stammers, her mouth gaping, her cheeks flushed. “No! No, I—”

“Come home with me,” she says, and she finds that she means it, truly, deeply, honestly, in all the ways possible. 

There are steps Jamie didn’t even notice she has taken until she’s two feet down, holding Dani’s hand in hers.

They’re less steps, she reckons, and more a slippery slope.

(She’s falling, and it’s terrifying.)

There are steps, and there’s a girl. And there was always a girl one way or another, but never like this, gods, never like this. Because Dani sings and the skies clear. And Jamie falls. 

No, it’s never felt anything like this.

She cannot think clearly when Dani is so close to her, when she pushes and pulls on her body, like it’s not enough, like it never will be.

She keeps thinking about why she’s still here, why she had sat beside her on that Saturday night, why she had followed her home.

Why she had now let _her_ follow Jamie home.

The answer, she believes, is all in the way Dani looks at her. Because the way Dani looked at her… people didn’t look at people like that, all bright-eyed adoration, and mischief, and interest. Like Jamie had been the most important person to ever grace her.

Dani looked at her and Jamie felt _seen_ , which was so dangerous it ignited her skin with fear and anticipation.

She breaks the kiss and the way Dani chases after her lips without even opening her eyes almost breaks her, then and there _._ For a moment she thinks she’s already in pieces when Dani lets out the smallest of gasps against her lips.

“I knew you before we met,” Dani says, and it sounds like the truth, “And I don’t even know you yet.”

Jamie traces her mouth softly, her thumb brushing over her bottom lip, smearing what little was left of the colourful wax, what little she hadn’t managed to kiss off yet.

She remembers of a story learnt when she was a child- before school had become unbearable, before she had been a child raising children by herself, before life had turned her into a not child- about bees touching lips and turning voices to honey. 

She wonders if Dani’s will taste as sweet as her voice at this moment.

And she’s no poet, but she knows what to say like it has been carved into her, like everything had been already written, and she was just acting her part out.

“So much of you, I’ve left in me to find. I knew you since before I met you,” she says before she can think too much of why the words feel so familiar in her mouth, “And I’ve looked for you since before that still.”

“Do you really mean it?” Dani whispers, and Jamie’s ribcage _aches_.

It’s too heavy. It’s all too heavy. And Jamie is just a girl.

(A girl falling before she was ready to. A girl that has never learnt how to fall without it hurting.)

“Sometimes you say the words the pretty girl wants to hear.”

“Is that really it?” Dani calls her bluff so quickly Jamie would be impressed were she not so busy trying to keep her heart from beating a hole against her chest.

_No,_ she wants to admit, _I say the words because I mean them. I hate the poetry of it, and I hate even more the fact I pretend to hate it._

_Mostly_ , she wants to admit, _I hate the fact I already love you when I just met you. And I spent so long building this wall and it took so little for you to take it down._

She doesn’t say any of those things. People didn’t say stuff like that in real life, anyway.

She kisses her instead.

Their first kiss had been… cold. And sticky, a bit, from the wine. And as hot as a furnace.

It had felt good, and right. But it hadn’t stopped the world as this one does. 

(A girl who fell, nonetheless.)

Because this kiss… this kiss steals her breath and her heart. It alights her soul. And then she thinks she must stop listening to Dani’s songs- but that’s farfetched- because they make her think things like kisses alighting souls. Which were awfully romantic and entirely idiotic things to think while a pretty girl kissed you.

Totally idiotic, she decides, and instead focuses on kissing the pretty girl back.

**

When they move in together, Jamie doesn’t let Dani touch the kettle or the coffee maker.

“Wouldn’t want for you to desecrate them, darling,” she says, as she shoos her away when Dani tries to squirrel her way next to the cupboard they store them in.

Dani only half pretends the indignation, Jamie knows, because she kisses her against the sink as soon as Jamie turns her way.

She leaves her in charge of hot cocoa and, well, the cooking she never quite learnt how to master, despite living on her own for all of her adult life.

(Not many kitchens she could use, in prison.)

(She doesn’t have an excuse for the last five years she’s been here. The kitchen just hates her, is what she tells Dani- not because she believes it, but because it makes her laugh each time.)

And Jamie grows moonflowers on the back gate when she doesn’t have to work.

She had never tried growing them before. They’ve always felt a bit too big, a bit too time-consuming. But she sees them grow and she thinks they’re worth it, after all. Good things are worth the effort.

Moonflowers- hope and perseverance, and the bells of the dead.

(Her hands were always stained black one way or the other, be it coal or dirt.)

“We used to have this book, when I was a kid,” she starts unprompted as she’s tending the garden on a rare sunny Sunday, while Dani hummed some song about spring coming back again- Jamie refrained from telling her they’re well into autumn.

Dani stops singing immediately, the note dying off and leaving only the birds chirping the tune.

Jamie spares a look in Dani’s direction, just enough to witness the weird experience that was Dani Clayton full, undivided attention. It’s, well, Jamie doesn’t know how to describe how it feels, but Dani had a way of making people gravitate to her. 

She was charming, to say it plainly, in that unassuming way that made it all the more captivating.

And to keep someone’s interest- someone like _Dani_ , kind and talented and beautiful in so many ways- well, it could make anyone feel special. So Jamie continues talking without even noticing, hoping her cheeks weren’t burning as hot as they felt. Planning on blaming the sun if they were.

“It was this big encyclopaedia of flowers and plants and trees. I loved it. Shite, I really did. Saw it one day in the shops. Begged for it day and night, until I found it at the foot of my bed the morning of my birthday.” 

Dani stays quiet, eyes still so focused on everything Jamie, and so she continues without thinking. “I wanted to open a flower shop when I was younger.”

That’s when she catches herself, cuts herself out of the spell by looking away from Dani’s too earnest eyes. She doesn’t want to talk about that particular childhood dream with Dani. She makes Jamie believe in all kind of impossible dreams. 

She doesn’t think she’d survive believing in this one.

“Why didn’t you?” Dani asks as Jamie had known she would.

“This isn’t a town made for flowers, innit?” she dismisses the thought in the same way her father had, “It’s bloody cold and miserable and the coal dust covers everything for miles on out. Nothing can grow out here.”

“Those ones seem to manage,” Dani says- like for her the only notion of wanting was reason enough to act, in life. 

(She’s losing entire wars every time Dani bats her pretty eyelashes her way.) 

(She’s starting to forget to hate it.)

“You know, I was surprised that anyone would even move here.”

Dani lets herself be distracted because she was kind like that. And Jamie really doesn’t know what she did to deserve all this kindness- doesn’t know how to pay it back in kind.

“And yet here I am.”

“Yeah, here you are,” Jamie agrees, letting everything fall from her hands as she crosses the small distance left between them and holds Dani instead, “Lucky me, too, I’d say.”

And then words are deemed unnecessary, as Jamie kisses her softly, as Dani lets her.

(Coal and dirt under her fingertips, but also _Dani_ \- and that made all the difference.)

**

_It’s an old song._

_It’s a love song._

**

There’s nothing more beautiful than Dani in the light of the morning.

It's that light just before dawn. 

Not like the bright sunshine that would wake Jamie just before her alarm goes off. Not the vivid red of those summer sunsets in movies, but that soft sunlight that lights up the whole room in bluish pink sunlight. And Jamie is no poet, but she reckons that this sunlight was solely made for Dani.

And well, Dani wasn’t a sad person- not out loud- but when she slept that layer of weariness she always tried to hide fell away until her delicate feature relaxed into a mask of peace.

So Jamie liked waking up just moments before the sun rose over the horizon, so that she could watch the light filtering through the blinds, and how Dani glowed underneath it.

Jamie also liked the fact she was one of the only ones that knew how Dani slept curled on her side, her arm always thrown over Jamie’s waist, how Dani snored just a little bit, just enough that it became the most endearing thing ever, how Dani would stiff slightly as she woke up, before sighing and curling even more into Jamie’s body.

Like she was about to do right now.

She feels Dani’s grip tighten across her waist before she finds herself staring into ocean-deep eyes.

“Good morning,” Dani whispers and presses a small kiss to her lips before she could think of complaining about morning breaths.

“Morning,” she whispers back, smiling despite herself.

“I want to wake up with you forever,” Dani shifts into the covers, curling further into her until Jamie’s completely surrounded by her scent, her warmth.

And since Jamie is incapable of sentimentalisms- at least out loud- before she’s had her tea, she replies- “You don’t usually wake up this side of the am, sweetheart.”

To Dani’s credit, she doesn’t miss a beat. She laughs and smooths over one of Jamie’s many untamed curls. Feather-light touches and so much love in her eyes, Jamie drowns and comes back to life all at once. 

“I want to go to sleep with you forever, then.”

And under Dani’s stare Jamie is all the more aware of who the woman warming her bed was- daughter of a king and of a muse. With so much fire in her eyes that she could burn down empires, an entire civilization, and still have some left to keep Jamie warm.

She thinks the conversation forgotten, until one day, weeks after the fact, Dani comes home with a plant, half dead. Jamie buries her hands in the dirt before she can think about what she’s doing, and Dani smiles like she knew she would do it. 

That’s when she realizes it.

Dani knows everything about her, remembers everything about her. All the small inconsequential things, all the secret shared without knowing, she carries it all- she carries it well.

And Jamie carries hers in return.

(She measures times in songs. She can’t stand the cold. She hates waking up in the morning. She has the coldest hands. She buries her head in Jamie’s shoulders when she falls asleep. She cries without making any sound.)

She doesn’t expect to find a ring in between the roots.

She doesn’t know what to do with this golden Claddagh in her hands until she looks up at Dani. 

She doesn’t- she can’t believe it real. And yet the metal bites cold in her hand. And yet Dani is smiling as wide as her mouth can afford to, and Jamie’s sure her own grin is splitting her face in two.

“Here’s the thing,” Dani says, and her arms are straight, and her hands are curled into fists like the first time they’ve spoken, “You’re my best friend. And I love our life—” 

Dani keeps speaking and Jamie struggles to keep her breathing in check.

(She’s never been one for rings, but this time, she thinks she’s going to make an exception.)

“And I know we can’t really afford to marry, yet, or have a ceremony, or anything that you’d deserve. But I don’t really care. We can wear the rings, and that will be enough for me if it’s enough for you.”

“Yes. Yeah," she doesn’t realize she’s laughing until Dani joins her, “Yes, I reckon it’s enough.”

And then Jamie rushes to kiss her, and kiss her, and kiss her, as laughter still bubbles silvery in her throat like champagne. She can’t help the smile.

And she would have never guessed happiness tasted like someone else’s lips. But that’s what it feels like at this moment. 

Dani stops her when her hands start to wander too far down, toeing at the hem of her shirt. “Wait.”

And then she takes the ring from where it was still clasped tightly in Jamie’s palm, unfolding her grip as gentle as a summer breeze. She slips it on Jamie’s finger before kissing it, and then she kisses her again.

“I do. I promise,” Jamie whispers against her lips, “Where’s yours?”

Jamie watches her bloom into a smile.

That’s the only way Jamie could describe it. 

Dani blooms, slowly and surely. 

First her eyes, always her eyes, crinkling at the corners with delight. And then her mouth slowly curls into her grin. And when she breaks into a full laugh, it’s like watching dawn crawl over the horizon, like fog receding in the wake of it. 

Like watching flowers blossom.

“In my pocket.”

Jamie doesn’t waste time in waiting as she slips her hand in Dani’s jacket pocket. She feels the cold ring and brings it to light. It’s identical to her own, only a little bigger. She looks in Dani’s eyes, waits until she nods before slipping it on her finger.

“I do,” Dani says back, before kissing her, slow and soft, “I promise.”

Dani smiles again and only then, when Dani blossoms, Jamie kisses her again until their smiles grow as big as their hearts and they’re doing nothing but bumping noses and laughing together.

And then she hugs her as close as she can, the tears striking hot lines down her cheeks.

“I’m truly done for, aren’t I?”

Dani laughs and it sounds like spring. “Afraid so, love.”

(But that too is more than fine.)

(Jamie loves her so much she could die of it- and she would be fine with it as long as she dies slowly and in her arms.)

**

Around the fourth time Owen starts delivering the same speech about love and loss and death he has been rehearsing since the night started, Jamie thinks she’s about ready to go.

She doesn’t bother to stop him, though. If she were to be honest, she’s kind of hoping for this to be the catalysts that will push him to talk to Hannah about all the things they keep leaving unsaid.

What can she say, Dani had gone and turned her into a romantic.

She wants one last beer, though, and she wants to have it with Dani- her wife.

She smiles at the thought.

(Her wife, her wife, _her wife._ )

Dani, who had slipped out back an unacceptable amount of time ago- three whole minutes, could you believe the cheek of her? She ignores Hannah pleading stare as she stumbles to her feet in the same direction she saw her wife go an unacceptable amount of time ago.

(Her wife, lord, will she ever get tired of saying that?) 

She finds her leaning against the back of the pub. 

Jamie allows herself a moment, to watch her. She’s rolling a cigarette with the same care she seemed to handle anything that comes into her hands- guitars, rollies, Jamie. 

Her hair falls in waves around her as she licks the paper and closes it. Jamie’s throat is suddenly parched for a different reason. She resists until Dani lights it, before intruding.

“Nasty habit that one,” Jamie says in lieu of a greeting, slipping the rolly from Dani’s mouth. 

She replaces it quickly with her own, any possible protest from Dani’s lips swallowed. She feels the taste of smoke on her tongue, and not for the first time she thinks Dani’s kiss would reduce her to cinders.

She leaves another bruising kiss, cupping her face with the hand _not_ holding the still lit rolly, before stepping away and taking a drag.

Dani’s eyes are still closed, as she says: “She says as she steals my cigarette.”

“We’re married, love, possession is ten-tenths.”

Dani rolls her eyes before taking back her cig- she doesn’t fool Jamie though. She recognizes the glint of happiness in them. “You don’t even like roll-ups.”

“Maybe,” she points out, before taking a slow drag, “I just like the taste of your lips.”

She enjoys the way Dani’s cheek turn a delightful light pink, her eyes suddenly evading Jamie’s. She does that smile, then, the one that’s tight-lipped embarrassment before it transforms in a self-conscious giggle. 

(Jamie fucking loves that smile.)

(Jamie fucking loves _her_.)

“Come home with me.”

“Ain’t that supposed to be my line?” Dani asks through hooded, heavy lashes, a tang of something Jamie could never quite place dirtying her accent until she’s slurring for it just as much as for the alcohol. 

Jamie swallows and tries to act cooler than she feels when Dani looks at her like that. “I’d never dream of stealing from you, Elvis.”

“And yet, there goes my heart.”

God, Jamie loves her so much she might actually burst.

“There goes mine,” she agrees softly with a smile.

Dani’s smile is positively blinding, as she approaches her, the picture-perfect of a tiger in the jungle.

“So, come home with me?” Jamie asks again because she so enjoys being a proper, utter fool for her wife- her _wife_ , lord she hopes she never gets used to it.

Dani smiles, and snatches the rolly right out of her lips, before replacing it with her own.

It’s a cold night, it’s a cold kiss. Jamie doesn’t mind, she just kisses her back. Holds her as close as she can. Which isn’t close enough, judging by the way Dani grabs her shoulders and collides them together.

Suddenly, Jamie doesn’t feel as cold.

Dani pecks her lips another time, soft and careful, the corner of her lips turned upright, and Jamie doesn’t think she’s ever felt this kind of love, never _received_ this kind of love before Dani had sung her way into her life.

“My, Miss Clayton what would the town preacher say?” Jamie teases, resting her forehead against Dani’s, “Kissing strange women behind pubs. Fornicating.”

Dani’s laugh is barely a puff of breath against Jamie’s lips. “It’s Mrs Clayton now, actually.”

“My apologies, Mrs Clayton. How could I ever make it up to you?”

“I do have some ideas…” Dani trails off, a wicked grin on her lips that makes Jamie tremble with anticipation.

There’s a familiar shiver that awakens as Dani’s thumb carefully brushes under the hem of her shirt. And there’s another, older and just as familiar shiver when the cold bites at the skin exposed by the touch.

“Sorry,” Dani says softly, each word a brush of her lips against hers, “I forgot winter was so near.”

“No, I—” Jamie trails off, decides it would be better to just kiss her once more instead. She wraps her arm around her neck, luring her back.

Dani doesn’t let her ask twice, as she pushes Jamie against the icy brick wall until the only thing Jamie could ever think of touching was her- her hips, her back, her lips. 

And she finds, she doesn’t much care for the cold as long as Dani holds her.

**

_It’s a tragedy._

**

There are so many promises between them, she thinks that in a way there were right from the start. 

Most are unspoken. A kiss on a cheek, a song late at night, a hand on a thigh. Small promises but promises all the same.

The most important one, though, is the one Jamie had spoken out loud what feels like a lifetime ago. It’s thin and gold and wrapped around the ring finger of her left hand. Sometimes it’s on a chain that rests over her heart.

It’s the most important promise Jamie will ever make.

Jamie had promised her other nights. Jamie had promised Dani every day of her life, and she would not be made a liar.

She crawls towards the light, and a hand is there to take her out. 

A miracle, they say, that she wasn’t crushed. Jamie would agree if they just let her go. She had to go. She had to find Dani.

She runs to their flat, searches for her in the kitchen, in their room, in the bathroom. But she’s not there. And if she isn’t there, buried in her undue grief, then that means that Owen and Hannah had unburied her.

She hopes she’s with them.

She hopes she isn’t alone in her grief, somewhere that wasn’t their flat.

“Where is she?” she burst into Owen’s shop, minutes later, not at all surprised when she finds Hannah there too. 

They’re drinking tea with sad faces that morph into surprise when they look up to find her, more soot than a body, standing there mostly unharmed.

“Jamie,” Owen gasps her name as if he had seen a ghost.

Maybe she was. She still didn’t feel all too real. She felt like she had cheated death somehow.

“I got out,” Jamie rushes out, looking for the third cup that wasn’t on the table- why wasn’t there a third cup on the table? Where had Dani gone? - “She has to know this. Where is she?”

_She has to_ , Jamie doesn’t say out loud, _because I know what it feels like to lose someone to the ground, to wait still for them to come back, to bury an empty box while their body was still so much more than six feet underground._

But Jamie did come back. She would always come back home to Dani.

“There’s been an accident.”

She doesn’t understand what Owen is trying to tell her at first. 

Of course, there’s been an accident. But she was here now. She was fine. She would be fine the moment she could hold Dani again.

She doesn’t understand until Hannah shakes her head, so sorrowful, so apologetic. “Jamie, darling. I’m so sorry. So very sorry. She didn’t make it.”

(She had promised her other nights.)

(She hadn’t expected that Dani would be the one to break the promise.)

She doesn’t know exactly how she makes it back to their room- her room, now, she supposes. 

She just ends up there all of the sudden.

There’s a jeans jacket folded on the chair by Dani’s side of the bed.

A scrap of paper falls from the folds of fabric when she picks it up, folded and folded again into itself. Jamie loves- loved? Loves, she decides.

(The past tense would have rung wrong even five years from now, Jamie will always love her in present tense she reckons.)

(It didn’t matter in any case; she wasn’t planning on anything but following her six feet under.) 

But she loves Dani too much to leave anything of her unread, unheard, undiscovered.

The paper is barely bigger than her palm, lyrics written and unwritten on both sides. She can make up so little of it, a _when the days are golden and we’re free,_ and _let us lay only for a while_ , and _will you still believe in me when the days grow colder?_

She thinks of how Dani had fallen so, so quick. Of how Jamie had wasted so much time. So much time. All the things she didn’t say, and now…

She breathes in deep, though her chest is broken by sobs and tears she can’t- she won’t- shed.

Jamie buries herself beneath a layer of covers and blankets and the pillow that still smelled like her, holding the jean jacket Dani had worn the first time they met. She holds it as close to her heart as she can manage, and she doesn’t close her eyes.

The weight of the blankets makes it hard to breathe, like she was still six hundred meters down, where green things didn’t grow. She knows deep in her heart she won’t ever step foot somewhere that wasn’t sea level. She knows deep in her heart she won’t ever feel alive again.

Undone.

That was what she was when you boiled down to it. Simply undone, without her. And she might survive it if she chanced it. But she doesn’t want to. She doesn't _want_ to.

So, let her die in another familiar darkness, where the smell of Dani lingered still, and she could pretend she was dying in her arms.

Jamie wakes and for a second, she’s blissfully unaware. A second that is, until she reaches for a warmth that wasn’t there anymore. A second is not enough. 

(Reality has a way of crashing down on people.)

She feels all of a sudden the presence of someone else in their room- her room, now, she supposes. And she must have been so out of it, she hadn’t heard Hannah, or Owen, knock, or the door creaking familiarly.

“Go away.”

Her voice sounds hoarser than she thought it would. Had she screamed? She doesn’t remember- but her throat feels burned raw, so maybe.

“She’s gone,” and that voice isn’t Owen’s, isn’t Hannah’s.

She doesn’t care enough to come out of the grave she had made for herself to find out whose it is.

“Yeah, no shit. Go away.”

“Danielle asked me for a favour,” the voice continues, and her name is enough to make Jamie face sunlight again, “A favour I could hardly deny. She’s family, after all.”

The voice belongs to a woman with dark skin and dark hair, and the saddest eyes Jamie had ever seen- then again, she hadn’t seen her own reflection yet that morning. She knows who she is the moment she spots the flowers growing on her hardwood floor.

(Black roses, yellow marigolds, and white lilies.)

(Death, grief, and sympathy.)

Still, she asks: “Who are you?”

She doesn’t much care for how the goddess in front of her might answer, but she figures it’s what she’s meant to ask.

“She asked me to tell you, she couldn’t risk her most important thing, her most important person. So, she made a deal with someone even my husband can’t go against.”

“What did Da—” Jamie’s voice breaks over her name, she swallows, “What did she do?” 

“And she asked me to tell you that she knows it’s rude of her to bow out of the dance early, she knows it’s not fair but to let her have her way. Just this one last time.”

“What did she do?” she demands again, as close to a yell as her sore throat allows her.

The woman sigh is half as sorrowful as her eyes. “She walked into her own grave willingly. For you. Don’t waste that gift.”

And she wants to yell again, to rage against this woman, this _goddess_ , that didn’t do anything to stop her. And she wants to yell at Dani, because, how could she? How dared she? To leave her with nothing but memories and last words spoken through the wrong lips.

“A gift?”

The goddess ignores her question. “And yet, you’re here. Hell-bent on becoming her mausoleum.”

“A gift?” she asks again, her words as close to a threat she can make against a god- but Jamie had always cared so little for blasphemy- “Go away. Get the fuck out of our house. Don’t you dare call it a gift.”

The goddess’ eyes are so sad and so black, an empty void- Jamie wonders what kind of grief could make someone’s eyes look like that, then again, she hadn’t seen her own reflection yet that morning- when she says: “Dead doesn’t mean gone.”

“Easy for you to say. You don’t die,” she pauses and decides to stop pretending she doesn’t know just who this woman in front of her is, “ _Gods_ don’t die.”

“And how much we wish we could, little dove.”

And since she hasn’t been smitten down just yet- “I don’t much care for your grievances. Get out.”

“I’ll tell you a secret then before I go,” Rebecca says softly, leaning in so close Jamie could count her eyelashes, so close she could see the shine in the corners of her eyes- but gods don’t cry- “He stole me away and dragged me under. I was a kid as much as I wasn’t. I trusted him. I loved him. Sometimes it seems like I still do.”

Jamie shakes her head, but Rebecca’s words do not leave her brain. “What do you want me to do?”

“Walk away. Don’t dive deeper than your lungs can carry you.”

“I will save her,” Jamie says, and it feels like saying some echo of a memory. Like a conversation she has already had with someone- maybe herself.

(Was she going insane in her grief, or didn't it all feel too familiar?)

“You will,” Rebecca sighs only like a goddess could sigh, deep and tired and _old_ , “And you will lose her. And then you will save her again. And then lose her once more. Over and over again.”

And Jamie might not understand a word she’s saying, but she still won’t-

“I don’t accept it,” her voice breaks as she says the words. She would try to say them again, but she fears a sob might breakthrough, and she refuses to shed tears in front of someone so alien.

“You must.”

“Why are you even here?”

“Because I can’t spare you the pain, dear. The only one who could do that is yourself.”

And Jamie herself doesn’t understand the words that surge from her chest, but she says them anyway: “This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.”

“It’s easy to spin the tale, once the story is already written,” Rebecca says, like she was asleep in a memory- but gods don’t dream.

“No, _you_ don’t understand. It wasn’t her time, it was mine. And it’s not fair. It’s not fair on anyone.”

“Fairness doesn’t come into it, dear. It never does.”

“Switch us,” Jamie says, and she knows how frantic she sounds, and her hands won’t stop her shaking but- “Let her come back, I’ll follow you down. I promise.”

“I’m afraid that’s not how it works. But I’ll tell you another secret before I go,” and this time she looks truly afraid, and Jamie wonders what gods could fear, “There’s another door. There always will be.”

“Where?”

“Deep in the well by the statue garden. There’s a crack at the bottom. Cracks let things pass through.”

She blinks, and Rebecca is gone, rotten flowers the only things left in her wake on Jamie’s hardwood floor.

Ghosts and gods had too much in common, it seemed.

It doesn’t take a genius to understand which well Rebecca had meant. People had whispered about it since she was born, usually in hushes once they had realized she had been standing there as a child.

(It was the well her father had been found in.)

There’s not much time for remembering, though. She puts her boots on, not bothering to change past that, and steps into the woods.

When she gets to the well, she isn’t sure what she’s meant to do, beyond descending into hell of her own volition.

She wonders if her wife, her love, her life, had been scared. She wonders why she isn’t. 

She wonders why the only thing that matters is having her back safe in Jamie’s arms.

“I’m coming.”

And the wind steals her words as she says them. 

And she falls.

**

_The song always started with- from- love, that’s what most don’t get._

_Hades had been in love with Persephone, or he had never learnt the right way to love so that he had mistaken it for that. But he thought it love regardless and so he asked her father for his right to marry her- he never asked the mother, and when later in the story the mother rages for her daughter back, turns the world upside down for the love of her, he will be sorry not to have asked._

_And then, maybe, if it were a better story, he would learn how to make up for his mistakes. He does better. He never makes up for that first act of violence, not that he ever could, but he tries to be good and that’s all anybody can ask for, at the end of the tale._

_This is not that story. This Peter will never learn. This Peter will never understand he had been wrong in the first place._

_Stories always start from love because it’s so easy to justify all acts in the name of love._

_The coal miner should know._

_(She’s about to do just that.)_

**

She had thought that hades would be darker. 

Cavernous, to use the pretty words her wife put in her songs. Bloody dark, to use her own.

It is neither.

It is, instead, faded. Though that’s not the right word either. It isn’t real. Doesn’t feel real, though it tries to pretend it is. It bleeds artificiality. The neon, the cement, the fog. It’s not real in the way a forest was.

(It was real in the way the mine shaft had been, though.)

She wonders if maybe it was as it was because the underworld was something made up by the humans that walked inside and if maybe it looked like this because Jamie thought of it the opposite of life and life was green. She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t think she wants to understand, either.

She sneaks past old walls held together by darkness, and guardians chained and asleep. She wonders how many walked in of their own free will. 

Doors kept close, yes, but from which way can’t they open?

And then any and all philosophies are unimportant because Jamie sees _her_.

Jamie runs to her without even realizing once she’d even started running. And when she finally reaches her, she pulls her to her body and is surprised to find her tangible and not a shadow.

Only then she allows herself to think her name again.

“Oh, Dani. I thought I lost you. I really did,” she whispers in her blonde hair, and when she breathes in her scent deep, it’s still Dani. If only maybe a bit more earthy than usual.

It takes a second before Dani’s arms wrap around her in return.

( _Isn’t that weird_ , a voice she never wants to listen to whispers in her ears.)

“You… did,” Dani seems to hesitate before uttering each word, “And I lost you first. I always do.”

She pushes her back a little, only enough she can look into her eyes. “What do you mean?”

Dani shakes her head, before shaking Jamie. “How are you here?”

She takes her hands before Dani manages to scramble the last of her wits.

“You’re not the only one that can sing, Elvis.”

“ _Why_ are you here?” Dani's hands start to trace her face, one feature at the time like she’s trying to mould her from clay, “Jamie—”

“I’ve lost many things in my life,” she interrupts before her wife could try and scold her for coming to save her, “But I don’t think I could handle losing you.”

Dani’s hands still. Jamie wraps her fingers around her wrist, keeps her in place against her cheek. She’s not warm, but she’d missed her touch so much, still.

There’s no heartbeat drumming against Jamie’s fingertips.

“Jamie…” Dani sighs again, and it breaks the heart she had just mended.

“Dani, please.”

“You had to live, Jamie. You _had_ to… you shouldn’t have come.”

“It’s so easy for you to say when you’re not the one being left behind.”

“I couldn’t have left you down there. I couldn’t,” Dani is so careful as she pushes their foreheads together, “I could never.” 

“You don’t decide who lives and who dies.”

“But I could save you, and that was the only thing that mattered.”

She takes Dani’s face into her hands, brushes a stray tear and kisses the other away. “Then let me save _you_ now. Please.”

She doesn’t think she’s ever seen her wife look so desperate.

“I made a deal, Jamie. A deal I can’t back on. You know, I’d follow you forever. But I’m bound.”

“Then I stay.”

But before Dani could reply, another voice joins the conversation. “Hello, lass.”

**

_The gardener hadn’t thought much about what her descent into the underground had meant._

_She had come through a crack, unnoticed, she had thought she would stay so until she found her wife. That maybe, if she was lucky enough, they would slip again before anyone ever noticed the misdeed._

_The gardener should have known better by now than to confide in luck._

_(Songbird versus rattlesnake.)_

**

“This is no place for you, lassie,” the man in the military coat smiles wide, “Not yet, at least.”

And Jamie would have to be a fool to not realize who the man in front of her is. Then again, Jamie was a fool anyway, because she stands taller as she holds Dani’s hand in hers, as she faces off a god.

“I came for her,” Jamie says loudly- is quite proud of how her voice doesn’t waver over the words.

The man in the military green coat laughs. “You did. And now, you go away. Because you can’t leave with her.”

“Then rejoice in having us both,” she spits the words in his face, holding onto Dani’s hand like a lifeline.

The way Dani squeezes her hand makes Jamie think her wife did not approve of her words. Well though shit, because Jamie hadn't approved of her offing herself either.

“I cannot,” the man- the god- says through gritted teeth, his eyes flashing in rage, “The weaver of stories made a deal and I cannot take you, though I want to.”

“Jamie,” Dani starts, but the man silences her with a look.

“But what do _you_ want, lass?”

Jamie stands as tall as she can when she answers- “I want my wife back.”

“Yeah,” the man in the military green coat sighs, and it all sounds like a performance, and a bad one at that, “I thought so. The real question is what would you give to get her back.”

And Dani screams when Jamie says- “Everything.”

And Dani falls when the man in the military green coat smiles wide. 

“So the story goes, little songbird, so the story goes. Her soul is mine though. She made a deal. She signed it in blood and honeyed water.”

“You can’t own people.”

“Oh, but I do, lass. I am the lord of the underworld. I am the god of the riches owned by the ground. _Owning_ is what I do.”

And as the man that looks more like a bloke she could find passed out in his own puke outside a pub than a god, spreads his arms, an army of faceless ghosts come out. Or maybe they were always there, watching. Or _not_ watching, because their eyes, their faces were gone. 

Oh shite, their whole faces were gone.

Jamie realizes, for the first time since she slipped through the crack in the well, that she may be a bit in over her head.

“Why do they look like that?”

“It’s what this place does to you,” Rebecca appears out of the shadows too, joining her husband in this trial with regret on her face, and Jamie swears for a moment she too looks worn down, “What happens to everyone who comes down here. You forget, bit by bit. The water smooths everything down, every memory, every feature.”

“Your eyes will look like that,” Rebecca’s husband says, and he seems creepily delighted by the fact, “If you stay down here long enough.”

“What do you mean? Will she look like that?”

“That’s what it looks like to forget who you are, who you’ve been,” Rebecca softly says.

“Will she forget me?”

“She’s already started to, lass,” and there’s that barely concealed glee again, Jamie would love nothing more than to hang him upside down, “You’ve noticed, haven’t you? How long it took for her to remember your name. How long before she forgets the feeling of loving you, too?”

“What do _you_ know about love, anyway?”

The lord of the underworld gasps theatrically and Rebecca’s already dimmed presence flickers weakly.

And Jamie had never much cared for gods, but for a second she can’t help the pity she holds for the young girl by his side- she has had so many names, the destroyer, the one who emerges, the lady of the underground, but Jamie knows that her first will always be Kore, and it will always be unfair.

He doesn’t even bother looking at his wife, his glare directed full force to Jamie. She tries her best not to roll her eyes. “Plenty more than you mortals do.”

Jamie notices despite herself how he spits out the word with equal parts insult and longing.

“You’ve got nothing to lose, nothing to fear. Just an endless span of time before you. And you forget what it’s like to love so viscerally, to live in fear of having what you love ripped away from you. No, gods _can’t_ love. You don’t have the strength to.”

“Don’t forget who I am,” he says, and it comes out a roar, shaking the rocks around them. Jamie doesn’t pay it any notice.

“What’s a god to her love? You could strike me down right now and it would matter so _little_. So, so little in comparison to her. And even if she has forgotten me, even if she will, I’ll remember for the both of us.”

_Well now you’ve done it_ , she thinks, as the man in the military green coat takes his hand from where it had rested in his pocket and curls it into a fist. And for sure Jamie had always been too good for her own good at pissing off people.

“Peter,” Rebecca puts a hand over his bicep. Slowly.

“We all know how the story ends. It’s a tragedy of certain separation,” Peter sighs- and how simple a name for a god, how insignificant as the rest of him, Jamie thinks, when compared to what he’d stolen from her- “Let’s just skip the middle.”

“You don’t know how the story ends,” Jamie says, though these are the first words that ring true and familiar since Peter had started talking.

She hates the way he smiles, too-white teeth and too clear eyes. “Oh, lass, but I do.”

“Well, then I suppose you wouldn’t care for a wager, _mate_.”

She doesn’t know if it’s her that successfully baited him, or if maybe it’s the opposite. She just knows it’s the best chance to change Dani’s fate she’s got.

“Name your terms.”

Ok, she really did not expect him to agree. She had not planned what to ask for. “She leaves with me.”

“That’s it?” Peter's lips curl into a grin, “Alright, she will. You have my word.”

“Name your terms,” Jamie echoes back before her fear got the better of her.

“She walks behind you, not beside you. You walk alone, and you hope she remembers you enough to follow. You walk alone, and you mustn’t turn until you’re both on the shore. Or you lose her again.”

“That’s not fair,” Dani whispers hoarsely, speaking for the first time since this whole negotiation has started. 

“But your love is so strong, innit? Still, we’re missing something. A wager is hardly a wager without a risk, I reckon.”

Peter looks at her, waiting, and Jamie knows she has to choose her words before he chose them for her.

“She follows me, and I don’t turn,” Jamie’s body trembles with each word, but she has to believe they’re the right ones, “And if I do…”

“Yes?”

“If I do, I forget her.”

She doesn’t elaborate further, just saying those words had taken more than she thought she could give. 

She thinks she will never forget his grin for as long as she lives.

She knows she has left a lot of room for him to twist her words. She had done so on purpose. She didn’t want Dani to fully understand what she was promising. She would never follow if she understood.

“I find those terms agreeable.”

(What she hadn’t told him: if she couldn’t have her back, she would die anyway.)

“I find those terms agreeable,” Jamie forces her mouth to shape the words, even as she turns to see Dani for one last time before their climb.

“That’s not fair,” Dani says again, but Peter doesn’t spare a glance her way.

“Thanatos doesn’t ever hold hands with Themis, I’m afraid,” Peter says as he waves his hand around, the darkness licking it like a pet with his master, or like fire and coal. A black throne answers his call, shadows upon shadows, twisted in the semblance of a seat.

“So?” he asks as he sits down on his throne, “What are you waiting for?”

Jamie doesn’t turn to face him, too busy committing to memory every detail of Dani’s face she thinks she will never- would never- forget but is now afraid she might. 

She burns the curve of her brow into her mind, the gentle slope of her nose… and her eyes, though she won’t remember them as desperate as they are now. No, she’ll remember them as they were as Dani sang, full of hope and full of love. 

Jamie reckons she’s never loved someone as much. Jamie reckons she never will.

“How do I know you’re telling the truth? That this is just another way to trick us.”

“I’d have to care about you to think about tricking you, don’t you think?” 

Jamie doesn’t like the contempt with which the lord of the underworld says it as if it delighted him beyond reason. She contemplates how easy it would be to smack the grin off his face.

But well, that is a good point, so Jamie doesn’t argue or agree, as she turns and starts walking the way she had come.

She knows Dani is following her, she knows she is right behind her, she feels the tug in her stomach she always feels when Dani looks at her. There’s no way any god could ever fake that.

They had barely started their climb before Dani decides to speak.

“Turn around,” Dani says- begs.

“No.”

“Please, Jamie,” and the way Dani says her name _breaks_ her down to her core, breaks her down to atoms, “Turn around.”

“No.”

“I can’t let you—”

“And _I_ can’t let you stay here,” Jamie cuts her off, “Where nothing green grows. Where there are no stars for you to sing for.”

“Jamie.”

She trips over a stone, skins her hand against another. She doesn’t turn. She can see the glimmer of light dancing over their heads, playing in the soft waves. She watches the way it the lights bounce off her own skin, the way it makes her hand look fluorescent, her blood neon.

She wonders how she’s breathing right now. Then again, she just went to the underworld to retrieve her dead wife so maybe breathing underwater was the least of her problems right now.

She wonders what Dani looks like under this underwater dancing lights. She can’t turn to witness it.

“And I can’t stay here, either, because I’ve decided that it isn’t worth it. Nothing but you is, princess. And we’ll get out, and we’ll live, and we’ll finally open up that flower shop in some other town that has some use for flowers.”

She can see in her mind, the exact way Dani is shaking her head right now- and she knows Dani’s shaking her head, Jamie _knows_ her wife. “You could have lived.”

“Everything I ever wanted, I wanted with you,” and if Jamie will have nothing more, well, at least she will have this, “You changed me, Dani. You made me hope for a future that has no meaning without you in it.”

“Jamie…”

“Look, we’re almost there,” she says with finality, “And I won’t turn around.”

Dani stays quiet after that. It fills Jamie with dread more than if she had kept objecting- because what if she had just stopped walking altogether. She won’t turn around to check, though. She just has to trust in her wife, and well, if she were to be honest, Dani had been the only thing Jamie had ever had faith for.

The light around them gets brighter and brighter until Jamie can see the sun just ahead of them. She picks up her pace, craving the feeling of the sun against her skin. She breaks through the surface of the lake and chokes on a gulp of air.

Jamie steps on the shores of the lake, and she finally turns around to greet her wife.

(Too soon.)

_(Until you’re both on the shore,_ Peter had said.)

Jamie had been right, though, the eerie light of the lake made Dani look ethereal, as she stood with the water brushing against her ankles.

“It’s you,” Dani says like she hadn’t believed it until that second.

It seemed that Dani too had been waiting to see her face again.

“It’s me,” Jamie confirms.

And there’s nothing else to be said- that _could_ be said- because Jamie had turned around too soon.

And Dani was slipping away from her.

**

_It’s an old song, it’s a love song. It’s a sad song, it’s a tragedy._

_And that’s how it ends._

_That is how it goes._

_(Or is it?)_

**

The thing is, this Jamie has known too much loss and too little love in her twenty-seven years or so on this godforsaken earth, and she has no intention to lose the love of her life too. Not twice in one day. 

_A tragedy of certain separation,_ Peter had said, but frankly, _fuck_ that.

So, she jumps towards her, the water of the lake suddenly real, suddenly cold and lapping at her ankles, and she reaches towards her wife, her life, her love.

And Dani reaches for her, too, half-shadow and half-ghost.

And when even that is not enough, Jamie jumps back into the lake, running back into her arms. And she holds her. Because as long as Jamie could hold her, nothing else mattered.

Here's the thing about stories, though, they are retold. And theirs was one of the oldest stories there ever was. And each time we tell the story, a detail goes missing, a new one is added. Stories are as much a reflection of those who tell them as they are of the actors in them.

(Stories, in the end, always change.)

And Jamie was so bone-tired of acting out a tragedy.

So she takes a deep breath, before dragging them both out of the waters.

(And sometimes, they do so for the better.)

She doesn't let go of her wife until they're both on solid ground, the sand and dirt scratching at Jamie's skin. But it doesn't matter. She’s dripping wet, and the air is too cold against her skin, but nothing matters.

Because Dani was hot against her touch.

Jamie smooths her thumb over her cheek, her other hand cupping her neck and holding her just close enough she can still make out the details she had so dearly missed of her wife's face.

That's when Dani gasps. “Your eyes.”

And if they're anything like Dani's own, Jamie will be in for a surprise next time she looks into a mirror. Because Dani's left eye... where once stood sky-blue, there was dark brown. Jamie's dark brown.

“Yours too, love,” she replies, finding that she didn't much care what had happened, “Now what?”

“There’s so much of the world I want to see,” Dani says, her voice drifting like it did when she told Jamie of all the dreams they could have. 

And Jamie wants to believe in them too. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“I don’t know what we just did,” Jamie starts, and she feels lightheaded the more she tries to think about it. 

( _A love so strong it shatters souls_ , three voices whisper in her head.)

Dani laughs- and, oh, how Jamie had missed that laugh. “I think you broke the story.”

( _A love so powerful it mends them_.)

“Good riddance, I say. I don’t know how much time we have still, but I want it with you. I wasn’t kidding when I said that everything I want, I want it with you.”

“An adventure?”

There’s a smile playing at her wife’s lips, one Jamie had been longing to see since she’s gotten out of that dreadful tomb.

“Why not.”

“Yes. Yeah,” and now the smile turns into a grin, and Jamie falls all over again in love with her, “I-- I’ll go anywhere as long as it’s with you.”

“Okay.”

Dani’s grin turns to giggles that turn to laughter, and for a moment it seems that the whole world has stopped to stand and listen to it.

And that’s when Jamie finally lets herself laugh. She falls on the shore, hair mixing with mud and dust.

**

_There’s an old song, an old tale from way back when._

_Each time the voice singing it changes, each time the song itself becomes slightly different. A detail added, a detail missed. No one knew exactly how it started, and yet everyone knew how it ended._

_The song belonged to a woman and her wife. It was a song about death and descents into hell. Though it was above all else, a song about love._

_This time, we shall start it like this._

_The singer- that really wasn’t a singer this time around, but who still had a fondness for the music sang by buskers on corners of busy streets deep in her heart- saw the coal miner one day._

_The coal miner wasn’t a coal miner either this time- or a gardener- but she still had a love for green, alive things. And the singer that wasn’t a singer loved her at first sight._

_(Some things, nothing could ever change.)_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading this tragedy musical induced au, hope you enjoyed it half as much as i did writing it
> 
> as always a round of applause for any kudos or comment left, and do hit me up on tumblr @somniatoressinespe i swear i wont bite.
> 
> cheers!

**Author's Note:**

> what does one do when hadestown gets stuck forever in their head? writes an angsty damie au, of course.
> 
> if you dont regret getting this far yet, part two will drop sometime next week, if i ever pull my shit together. if any of y'all wants to scream at me in the meantime you can also find me on tumblr @somniatoressinespe
> 
> kudos and comments are much appreciated!
> 
> cheers!


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